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Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Across the River and Into the Trees (Paula Ortiz)

Hemingway’s work across novels and short stories has been adapted for film countless times over, yet Across the River and Into the Trees has never properly been rendered onscreen. Until now. Written by Peter Flannery and directed by Paula Ortiz, here is a handsome film that is decidedly modest in its endeavor. The best thing going for it is Liev Schreiber as Colonel Richard Cantwell, the lead of the picture. Schreiber is one of those actors who has somehow always been underrated, despite being capable of playing nearly any kind of part. A kind boyfriend thrust into an impossible familial situation (The Daytrippers)? Check. Tough-but-fractured fixer living on the edge (Ray Donovan)? Check.

November 2024, Criterion Channel is set to deliver an exceptional lineup of films that will excite cinephiles and casual viewers alike. The month promises a rich exploration of genres, featuring a strong selection of Coen Brothers classics such as Blood Simple (1984) and The Big Lebowski (1998), along with their more recent works like A Serious Man (2009) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). Noir and crime enthusiasts will revel in an array of titles, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), Gilda (1946), and The Big Heat (1953), showcasing the genre’s iconic narratives and stylistic depth. International cinema also shines through with compelling French dramas like Fat Girl (2001) and Dheepan (2015), highlighting diverse storytelling from around the globe.

The lineup doesn’t shy away from classic drama, featuring timeless films like On the Waterfront (1954) and Seven Samurai (1954), which continue to resonate with contemporary audiences. Additionally, viewers can look forward to a variety of documentary and experimental films, including Wild Wheels...

[Editor’s note: This article was originally published in February 2022 and has been updated multiple times since.]

Sex on film is nothing new, and yet unsimulated intercourse in non-pornographic movies has raised eyebrows and drawn eyeballs for decades. From Vincent Gallo’s controversial directing for “The Brown Bunny” to Robert Pattinson’s masturbatory method acting in “Little Ashes,” genuine intimate encounters captured on film — however staged they may be — can pull audiences into the bigger stories their writers and directors are trying to tell.

Catherine Breillat’s first film in 1976, “A Real Young Girl,” adapts her own controversial novel about a 14-year-old exploring her newfound sexuality. Breillat’s later work, 1999’s “Romance,” tells the story of a woman desperately seeking human connection and featured similar scenes, including sadomasochistic sex play.

“Actors are prostitutes because they’re asked to play other feelings,” Breillat told IndieWire. “This prostitution is not profane; it’s a sacred act that we give them.”

John Cameron Mitchell set out to “honor” sex as a pastime for real people,...

With Janus possessing the much-needed restorations, Catherine Breillat is getting her biggest-ever spotlight in November’s Criterion Channel series spanning 1976’s A Real Young Girl to 2004’s Anatomy of Hell––just one of numerous retrospectives arriving next month. They’re also spotlighting Ida Lupino, directorial efforts of John Turturro (who also gets an “Adventures In Moviegoing”), the Coen brothers, and Jacques Audiard.

In a slightly more macroscopic view, Columbia Noir and a new edition of “Queersighting” ring in Noirvember. Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse trilogy and Miller’s Crossing get Criterion Editions, while restorations of David Bowie-starrer The Linguini Incident, Med Hondo’s West Indies, and Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue make streaming debuts; and Kevin Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park arrives just in time for another grim election day.

See the full list of titles arriving in November below:

36 fillette, Catherine Breillat, 1988

Anatomy of Hell, Catherine Breillat,...

From her controversial 1976 directorial debut “A Real Young Girl” to even more confrontational later works like “Romance” (1999) and “Anatomy of Hell” (2004), French auteur Catherine Breillat has long been one of the cinema’s premier chroniclers of desire in all its complexities and contradictions. Her latest film, “Last Summer,” is one of her best, a riveting and nuanced portrayal of an affair between an attorney (Léa Drucker) and her 17-year-old stepson (Samuel Kircher) that’s paced like a languorous Éric Rohmer dramedy but grips the audience like a thriller. It’s a remake of the Danish movie “Queen of Hearts,” and while the script by Breillat and Pascal Bonitzer provides “Last Summer” with meticulously crafted dialogue, characterizations, and situations, it’s only a starting point; the greatness of the film is in the visual execution, which is just as Breillat intended.

“One mistake that people often make is they confuse the script with the film,...

Kim Gordon, founding member of Sonic Youth and Body/Head on Catherine Breillat and the music with Anne-Katrin Titze and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman: “It was a real honour of my life to be in one of her films.”

In the first instalment with Kim Gordon on Catherine Breillat, we discuss the songs in Last Summer (L'Été Dernier) - Body/Head’s Tripping (Bill Nace and Kim Gordon), Sonic Youth’s Dirty Boots, and Léo Ferré’s Vingt Ans, and we are joined by music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman. Kim’s initial encounters with Breillat films are A Real Young Girl (Une Vraie Jeune Fille) and then 36 Fillette. We also touch on Kim’s latest work with French choreographer Dimitri Chamblas, Ed’s copy of the mastered cassette of their second album Bad Moon Rising Sonic Youth dropped off at 99, and a word on Brooks Headley’s Superiority Burger.

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2023, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

In all honesty, the films of 2023 should take a backseat to the images we are seeing every day in Gaza, where journalists and average citizens have been recording and documenting a daily assault on their homes and livelihoods by the Idf. Whatever fakery we watched and enjoyed in the cinema this year should always be kept in perspective in importance with images that are real and actually happening right now. The Palestinians who have documented these important images have been targeted and killed with intent and purpose to silence what their photos and videos are showing and saying.

List of journalists who have been killed.

The below is of lesser note:

Best First Watches:

Angel’s Egg La belle noiseuse Centipede Horror Charley Varrick Coffy Crimson Gold...

Last Summer.Catherine Breillat holds eye contact with such intensity that it’s difficult not to feel a little intimidated in her presence. It’s an apt trait for a filmmaker of equally, and brilliantly, intimidating films. Unafraid, even eager, to cause discomfort, Breillat has dedicated her career to the cinematic excavation of taboo subjects and liberating female desire onscreen.With her first film in ten years, Last Summer, Breillat presents a reworking of May el-Toukhy’s 2019 film Queen of Hearts in which a lawyer, predominantly working on sexual assault cases, has an affair with her 17-year-old stepson. The project is challenging in the ways you might expect from the filmmaker, but somehow tamer, too; the sex is not explicit in the manner of Romance (1999) or Anatomy of Hell (2004), nor are the shocks quite as violent as they are in her widely celebrated Fat Girl (2001). Her approach here feels more...

Catherine Breillat doesn’t make porn. Anyone familiar with the 73-year-old French auteur knows her frank portraits of female sexuality are complex, often transcendent explorations of desire through a metaphysical lens. That impulse extends back to Brelliat’s first film in 1976, “A Real Young Girl,” in which she adapted her own controversial novel about a 14-year-old’s sexual awakening. It has stayed with her through the decades in everything from “Fat Girl” to “Sex Is Comedy,” which fictionalizes the discomfort of shooting a sex scene.

Many of those movies are included in a new 11-film Breillat retrospective at New York’s IFC Center, but none epitomize Breillat’s daring aesthetic more than 1999’s “Romance,” the absorbing story of a young woman named Marie who finds catharsis from her sexless relationship with her boyfriend in a series of ambitious trysts. One of these leads to her rape; another inspires her revenge.

The Flower of Her Secret: Lindon Conquers a Crush in Directorial Debut

Exemplifying the sincere transitional period Britney Spears famously moaned about when she sang “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman,” writer/director/star Suzanne Lindon proves she’s a triple threat in her debut Spring Blossom (Seize printemps) in a narrative which echoes the same sentiments. The daughter of noted French thespians Sandrine Kiberlain and Vincent Lindon, she scripted the film when she was only fifteen years old, and five years later impresses with an assured, autobiographically inclined slant on sentiments specific to a particular age.

Curiously, it’s the sort of scenario we’ve seen through the sexualized lens of either an older male’s perspective or even the liberating gaze of an experienced woman, so there’s a doubling refreshing quality with the title, suggesting the sweet naivete of desire’s first bloom but...

The French director Catherine Breillat was this year’s head of the Concorso Internationale Jury at the 72nd edition of the Locarno Film Festival, the first edition under the new artistic director Lili Hinstin. The way in which Breillat portrays the female body and connects it to the notions of shame and fear in her cinema places her among radical feminist artists the likes of Carolee Schneeman and Yayoi Kusama. These are artists that radically challenged the prevailing conventions and taboos that have always existed throughout history with their performances, cinema, and art. Their work was often met with great hostility, as these women revealed and reclaimed that what is normally hidden and stigmatized: female desire, fear, and nudity.I spoke to Catherine Breillat in Locarno about sexual hypocrisy, the academic distinction between erotica and pornography, and the #MeToo movement. Notebook: Perhaps to start off, since you are the head...

Catherine Breillat is no stranger to controversy. If the French novelist and director has spent a career confronting censorship and social taboos, that has not prevented her from developing a reputation as one of the world’s most iconoclastic and widely acclaimed authorial voices.

From her 1976 directorial debut, “A Real Young Girl,” through to 2013’s “Abuse of Weakness,” Breillat has continually sought to examine and reframe conventional depictions of femininity, more often than not twisting them towards provocative ends. This year she heads the Locarno Film Festival jury – which marks a fitting choice for both a festival finding new footing under the leadership of artistic director Lili Hinstin, and for a larger film culture still wrestling with many of the questions Breillat has regularly explored.

Variety spoke with this year’s jury president shortly before she packed her bags for Locarno. [Note: This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]

Do you have any history with Locarno?

Locarno was...

When Greta Gerwig’s already-lauded “Lady Bird” hits limited release later this week, the actress-writer-director will join a long line of other female filmmakers who used their directorial debut (this one is Gerwig’s solo directorial debut, just for clarity’s sake) to not only launch their careers, but make a huge mark while doing it. Gerwig’s Saoirse Ronan-starring coming-of-age tale is an instant classic, and one that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has enjoyed Gerwig’s charming work as a screenwriter in recent years, bolstered by her ear for dialogue and her love of complicated and complex leading ladies.

While Hollywood still lags when it comes to offering up opportunities to its most talented female filmmakers, many of them have overcome the dismal stats to deliver compelling, interesting, and unique first features. In short, they’re good filmmakers who made good movies,...

Mubi's retrospective, Catherine Breillat, Auteur of Porn?, is showing April 4 - June 3, 2017 in Germany.Sex Is ComedyThroughout her career, Catherine Breillat has provided viewers with a long-form meta-cinema experience. While metacinema is as old as the medium itself, since her debut feature A Real Young Girl in 1976, Breillat has developed a distinct form of it: one that collapses ‘autobiographical’ material, various artistic sensibilities, and the process of filmmaking itself.Like dozens of other English words—such as ‘aesthetic’ or ‘abject’—the word ‘meta’ has been largely misused or misapplied with regard to the film and literary criticism. Regarding the consumption of fiction, the appropriate use of the term 'metafiction,' 'metafilm,' et cetera, has its basis in the Greek meta, which does not translate directly into English but can be understood as a preposition similar to the English word ‘about’ (‘having to do with,’ or ‘on the subject of’). Metafiction is therefore,...

Sextette: Gurfinkel’s Debut an Uncomfortable Sashay into Female Victimhood

Exuding enough uncomfortable finesse to be ranked as one of several cinematic explorations that appear to offer homage or exist as acolytes to the cinema of Catherine Breillat, Johnathan Gurfinkel’s feature debut, S#x Acts manages to be memorably unsettling even as it treads familiar territory. The sexual awakening of the adolescent female offers an endless amount of discomfort, degradation, and humiliation for young women in any language or land, it seems, and Gurfinkel’s film certainly doesn’t aim for empowerment or agency. But what his film does depict is that faint line between consensual sex and rape, where there exists a classic grey zone that blurs issues of mere pleasure with sex as a tool to gain power, control, and often that thing that sex by itself never yields: love.

Gili (Sivan Levy) has recently moved to a wealthy suburb in Israel,...

Writing a series focused on the depiction of gender and sexuality in films, it would be a massive oversight not to talk about the work of French director Catherine Breillat. Few other directors have as consistently explored these topics as directly or as interestingly. The next few articles will explore Breillat’s 13 feature films in detail.

One can get an idea about Breillat’s filmmaking philosophy through some of her contributions outside of directing in the 1970s. She has a small acting role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris. She contributes commentary on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Sálo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which is featured in the Criterion release of that film. She is a screenwriter on David Hamilton’s teenage coming-of-age/erotica film Bilitis. All three directors provoke controversy through their work and the open depiction of sexuality, whether due to the graphic nature of the sexuality,...

The French filmmaker and novelist, Catherine Breillat, has frequently appeared in the media as a controversial figure due to the explicit and realistic nature of her cinematic treatment of female sexuality, sibling rivalry and violence (Une Vraie Jeune Fille (A Real Young Lady)). In the last couple of years, the 62 year-old filmmaker has featured [...]

Continue reading Breillat Boards Abuse Of Weakness Starring Huppert on FilmoFilia.

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Chicago – So many films come and go without leaving a permanent imprint on one’s cinematic memory. Catherine Breillat’s galvanizing 2001 drama, “Fat Girl,” is most certainly not among them. I’ll never forget the profound level of shock and unease I felt during my initial viewing of the picture, which was eventually followed by a deep admiration of Breillat’s uncompromising bravery in tackling such disquieting material.

Ever since her 1976 directorial debut, “A Real Young Girl,” the French auteur has made a great many moviegoers (particularly of the male persuasion) uncomfortable by depicting primal sexuality from a female perspective. She doesn’t shy away from exploring the awkwardness and confusion that’s often glossed over in most coming of age tales. The dangers posed by predatory men emerge as a tangible threat in her work, though Breillat never follows a predictably moralizing path when dealing with gender conflict.

Blu-Ray...

Filmmaker Angela Ismailos decides that the best way to learn about cinema is by interviewing several veteran movie directors. This is the central idea for the new documentary, The Great Directors. I would say that the film offers an overview of the world’s best filmmakers, but the interview subjects are from North America and Europe. It’s a shame that the Middle East, Asia, India, and Australia are not represented. Perhaps they will be included in a follow-up sequel. The directors included offer some interesting insights into the history of cinema.

A talk with Italian filmmaker, Bernardo Bertolucci who relates a story about a childhood encounter with Pier Paolo Pasolini that sparked an interest in cinema, begins the film. Later he talks about his work including his censor problems over Last Tango In Paris (some countries banned it for decades). In France we meet Catherine Briellant who also had...

To celebrate its 20th Anniversary, it appears as though the Tiff Cinematheque is set to pull out all the stops.

According to Criterion, the Tiff, formerly known as the Cinematheque Ontario, will be bringing out a rather superb and cartoonishly awesome summer schedule, that will include films ranging from Kurosawa pieces, to films from Pier Paolo Pasolini. Other films include a month long series dedicated to James Mason, Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, a tribute to Robin Wood, and most interesting, a retrospective on the works of one Catherine Breillat.

Personally, while the Kurosawa, Pasolini, and Rohmer collections sound amazing, the Breillat series is ultimately the collective that I am most interested in. Ranging from films like the brilliant Fat Girl, to the superb and underrated Anatomy of Hell, these are some of the most interesting and under seen pieces of cinema of recent memory, and are more than...