New to Stream: The Criterion Channel’s July 2020 Lineup

Inspired by director Joan Micklin Silver’s time working at New York’s storied alt weekly the Village Voice, this unsung gem of 1970s slice-of-life seriocomedy offers an incisive, bittersweet look at a shifting media landscape that feels as fresh and relevant as ever. At the offices of a Boston independent newspaper, the staff members—including music critic Max (Jeff Goldblum, in one of his first leading roles), news reporter Harry (John Heard) and photographer Abbie (Lindsay Crouse)—enjoy a positive and open-minded work environment. However, it seems as though their relatively carefree days are numbered when the owner of a major publishing company buys the paper, leading to more money, but big changes.

Winner of the best director award at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the latest social-realist triumph from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne finds the pair applying their patented brand of heartrendingly empathetic humanism to an explosive subject. Under the sway of his radical imam, Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi, in a revelatory debut performance), a thirteen-year-old Muslim boy growing up in a small Belgian town, becomes increasingly enamored with the tenets of violent religious extremism—a rejection of his family and society that has shocking consequences. Resisting both easy answers and the urge to sensationalize, the Dardenne brothers offer a clear-eyed, grippingly naturalistic portrait of a young life in crisis graced with the expansive compassion that has made them among the most consistently lauded cinematic voices of our time.

The expanses of the American West take center stage in this intimately observed triptych from Kelly Reichardt. Adapted from three short stories by Maile Meloy and unfolding in self-contained but interlocking episodes, Certain Women navigates the subtle shifts in personal desire and social expectation that unsettle the circumscribed lives of its characters: a lawyer (Laura Dern) forced to subdue a troubled client; a wife and mother (Michelle Williams) whose plans to construct her dream home reveal fissures in her marriage; and a night-school teacher (Kristen Stewart) who forms a tenuous bond with a lonely ranch hand (Lily Gladstone), whose longing for connection delivers an unexpected jolt of emotional immediacy. With unassuming craft, Reichardt captures the rhythms of daily life in small-town Montana through these fine-grained portraits of women trapped within the landscape’s wide-open spaces. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with Kelly Reichardt, executive producer Todd Haynes, and author Maile Meloy.

The roar of the engines, the smell of burning rubber on pavement, and the adrenaline-rush exhilaration of pedal-to-the-metal speed: the kinetic thrill of cool cars in motion is front and center in these two action classics guaranteed to get your motor running. Steve McQueen confirmed his status as the King of Cool with his steely turn in the lean, mean thriller Bullitt, featuring the most iconic car chase ever filmed: a full-throttle pursuit up and down the vertiginous streets of San Francisco. Then, director John Frankenheimer puts you in the driver’s seat in Grand Prix, a sleekly stylized, star-studded technical masterpiece set in the daredevil world of Formula One racing, featuring one of Saul Bass’s most virtuosic title sequences.

Fifth graders from across New York City’s public schools journey into the life-changing world of ballroom dancing in this irresistible documentary from Marilyn Agrelo. Told from the always candid, often hilarious perspectives of the kids themselves, Mad Hot Ballroom traces their journeys from reluctant participants to pint-sized Astaires as they set out to win it all in a citywide competition. Along the way there are trials, tears, life lessons, and, above all, joy—especially when the kids hit the dance floor to strut their stuff.

A new breed of westerns emerged after World War II, stained by film noir’s anxious, disenchanted mood and enriched by its psychological and moral complexity. Romantic myths of the frontier gave way to tougher tales of ruthless outlaws, corrupt cattle barons, gold-crazed prospectors, mercenary gunfighters, and lonely, damaged men obsessively pursuing vengeance for past wrongs. Essential noir actors found a home on the range: Robert Mitchum brings his cool, world-weary pessimism to Blood on the Moon and Man with the Gun, while Robert Ryan’s tortured tension anchors the gripping Day of the Outlaw. Women, long marginalized in westerns, wielded newfound power, but not without getting their hands dirty; the femmes fatales of western noir include Barbara Stanwyck (The Violent Men), Ida Lupino (Lust for Gold) and Marlene Dietrich (Rancho Notorious). From brooding black-and-white dramas like Station West and I Shot Jesse James to the harrowing, elegiac masterpieces of Anthony Mann, the West’s wide-open spaces prove as haunted and dangerous as any dark city.

A love letter to the analogue pleasures of an increasingly niche technology, this thought-provoking documentary is a rich, affectionate portrait of artists, writers, and collectors who remain steadfastly loyal to the typewriter as a tool and muse. Featuring interviews with high-profile enthusiasts like Tom Hanks, Sam Shepard, David McCullough, John Mayer, and others, it also movingly documents the struggles of California Typewriter, one of the last repair shops in America dedicated to keeping the aging contraptions clicking. As the digital age’s emphasis on speed and convenience reshapes our relationship to technology, CALIFORNIA TYPEWRITER asks us to consider who’s serving whom: human or machine?

Touchstone works in the evolution of the New Queer Cinema movement, these twin tales of aimless youth by Gus Van Sant are swooning expressions of his signature concern: the emotional journeys of young men adrift on the margins of society. While editing his boldly original debut feature Mala Noche, about a romantic deadbeat’s wayward crush on a handsome Mexican immigrant, Van Sant met Mike Parker, a Portland street kid who became the inspiration for the young hustler played by River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho. Further developing the themes of queer identity, transience, and unrequited longing, Van Sant created an intoxicating anthem of outsiderhood that stands as one of the defining independent films of the 1990s.

Jafar Panahi’s revelatory debut feature is a child’s-eye adventure in which a young girl’s quest to buy a goldfish leads her on a detour-filled journey through the streets of Tehran on the eve of the Iranian New Year celebration. Co-written by Panahi with his mentor Abbas Kiarostami, this beguiling, prizewinning fable unfolds in documentary-like real time as it wrings unexpected comedy, suspense, and wonder from its seemingly simple premise.

Master documentarian Patricio Guzmán travels ten thousand feet above sea level to the driest place on earth: Chile’s Atacama Desert, where astronomers from all over the world gather to observe the stars in a sky so translucent that it allows them to see to the boundaries of the universe. The Atacama is also a place where the harsh heat of the sun keeps human remains intact, including those of political prisoners “disappeared” by the Chilean army after the 1973 military coup. Just as astronomers search for distant galaxies, surviving relatives of the disappeared search for the remains of their loved ones in a quest to reclaim their families’ histories. Melding the celestial and the earthly, Nostalgia for the Light is a gorgeous, moving, and deeply personal odyssey into both Chilean history and the furthest reaches of space.

As Shirley Temple grew up before the eyes of America, this delightful comeback vehicle offered her a chance to shine in a new kind of film: a charming teenage romance, complete with jive-talking, jitterbug-mad bobby soxers. She displays her patented pluck (and receives her first on-screen kiss) as starry-eyed fourteen-year-old Annie Rooney, who pines for nerdy classmate Marty (Dickie Moore) even though his wealthy family looks down on her working-class background. When Annie’s father (William Gargan) invents a new form of synthetic rubber, however, it may just be her ticket to love.

Originally scheduled to begin this month, the Tokyo Olympic Games have been postponed, but you can still celebrate a century of Olympic glory with this monumental collection. Spanning fifty-three movies and forty-one editions of the Olympic Games, 100 Years of Olympic Films: 1912–2012 is the culmination of a massive, award-winning archival project encompassing dozens of restorations by the International Olympic Committee. The documentaries collected here cast a cinematic eye on some of the most iconic moments in the history of modern sports, spotlighting athletes who embody the Olympic motto of “Faster, Higher, Stronger”: Jesse Owens shattering world records on the track in 1936 Berlin, Jean-Claude Killy dominating the Grenoble slopes in 1968, Joan Benoit breaking away to win the Games’ first women’s marathon in Los Angeles in 1984. In addition to the impressive ten-feature contribution of Bud Greenspan, this stirring collective chronicle of triumph and defeat includes such documentary landmarks as Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia and Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad, along with captivating lesser-known works by major directors like Claude Lelouch, Carlos Saura, and Miloš Forman. It also offers a fascinating glimpse of the development of film itself, and of the technological progress that has brought viewers ever closer to the action. Traversing continents and decades, reflecting the social, cultural, and political changes that have shaped our recent history, this remarkable movie marathon showcases a hundred years of human endeavor.

Meet the 12 O’Clock Boys, an infamous urban dirt-bike pack who whiz through the streets of Baltimore. Popping wheelies and weaving at excessive speeds through traffic, the group impressively evades the hamstrung police. Three years in the making, Lotfy Nathan’s wild, dynamic documentary captures their death-defying antics through the eyes of young adolescent Pug, a bright kid from the Westside obsessed with the riders and willing to do anything to join their ranks. Propelled by breathtakingly kinetic footage that takes viewers along for the ride, 12 O’Clock Boys spins a compelling, intimate story of a young boy and his dangerous, thrilling dream.

The film that rocked the foundations of the 1980s underground, this postpunk provocation is a DIY science-fiction fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a social-democratic cultural revolution. When Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield), the black revolutionary founder of the Woman’s Army, is mysteriously killed, a diverse coalition of women—across all lines of race, class, and sexual orientation—emerges to blow the system apart. Filmed guerrilla-style on the streets of pregentrification New York, Born in Flames is a Molotov cocktail of feminist futurism that’s both an essential document of its time and radically ahead of it.

B-movie master Joseph H. Lewis turns the ingredients of dime-store pulp into existentialist poetry in these essential noirs, which stand as two of the most stylish and influential examples of the genre ever made. His innovative camera work and eye for pop iconography made the slam-bang couple-on-the-run thriller Gun Crazy a favorite of the French New Wave upstarts, and its influence is felt in everything from Breathless to Bonnie and Clyde. In The Big Combo, the atmospheric cinematography of shadow painter John Alton, dramatically stylized set pieces, and killer performances from Cornel Wilde, Richard Conte, and Jean Wallace come together in a mesmerizingly moody, thematically subversive model of high art wrung from a low budget.

The original Godzilla team of director Ishiro Honda, special-effects supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya, and composer Akira Ifukube reunited for this kaiju extravaganza, which features no fewer than eleven monsters. Set in the remote future of 1999, when the people of Earth have achieved world peace by confining destructive creatures to Monsterland (until an alien race intervenes), Destroy All Monsters mounts a thrilling display of innovative action sequences and memorable images that have made it a favorite for generations of viewers.

The formally adventurous and psychologically intricate films of renowned Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan unfold according to complex, time-scrambling structures that heighten their searing emotional impact. Exploring issues of identity (including his own Armenian heritage), loss, alienation, and technology, Egoyan’s films frequently revolve around people struggling to make sense of their own shattered sense of self in the wake of profound personal tragedies. His provocative themes and elliptical style are on display in early critical triumphs like Next of Kin and Calendar and reach new heights of virtuosity in his masterpieces Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, both of which are widely considered among the greatest Canadian films ever made.

Young women navigate the fraught terrain of adolescence in these richly immersive coming-of-age snapshots that touch on issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Haley Elizabeth Anderson’s lyrical, atmospheric short Pillars evokes the world of a girl growing up in the American South as she experiences a series of awakenings—some blissful, others brutal—after she receives her first kiss. Half a world away, on the outskirts of Paris, a teenager undergoes a similarly rocky journey toward finding herself in Céline Sciamma’s compassionate, unflinching Girlhood, which captures the rapturous highs and crushing lows of female friendship.

Serbian visionary Emir Kusturica (Underground) gate-crashed Hollywood with this singular, marvelously loopy surrealist comedy featuring a remarkable cast that includes Johnny Depp, Faye Dunaway, Jerry Lewis, Lili Taylor, and Vincent Gallo. When his uncle (Lewis) in Arizona invites him to come work at the family car dealership, Axel Blackmar (Depp), a young man from New York obsessed with Eskimos and fish (and, specifically, their dreams), heads West, where he encounters lusty romance with a wealthy widow (Dunaway) and a series of oddball exploits involving turtles, a DIY flying machine, and a strikingly convincing recreation of an iconic set piece from North by Northwest. Like its title implies, Arizona Dream takes place on its own hallucinatory wavelength, a delirious, anything-goes vision of America as seen through the eyes of one of cinema’s great magic makers.

Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, an Oscar-winning tale of savagery in medieval Sweden, served as a direct influence on Wes Craven’s notoriously nasty debut feature, The Last House on the Left. But despite sharing similar premises, these harrowing dramas about rape, murder, and revenge are the results of two vastly different directorial visions: the earlier film is a powerful interrogation of faith and morality, while Craven’s spin is a shocking work of grindhouse depravity that was banned around the world for its graphic violence and helped usher in a new era of exploitation horror cinema.