Insiang (1976) | May 30, 11:00 pm

Jealousy and violence take center stage in this claustrophobic melodrama, a tautly constructed character study set in the slums of Manila. Lino Brocka crafts an eviscerating portrait of an innocent daughter and her bitter mother as women scorned. Insiang leads a quiet life dominated by household duties, but after she is raped by her mother’s lover and abandoned by the young man who claims to care for her, she exacts vicious revenge. – The Criterion Channel

Director: Lino Brocka

Cast: Hilda Koronel, Mona Lisa, Ruel Vernal, Rez Cortez

Country: Philippines

Distributor: Janus Films

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 1 hour, 35 minutes

Platform: The Criterion Channel

Special Programming: Classic Cinema

Wanda (1970) | May 29, 11:00 am

Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. – The Criterion Channel

Director: Barbara Loden

Cast: Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins

Country: United States

Distributor: Janus Films

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 1 hour, 44 minutes

Platform: The Criterion Channel

Special Programming: Classic Cinema

Diamonds of the Night (1964) | May 28, 11:00 am

Adapted from a novel by Arnošt Lustig, Diamonds of the Night closely tracks two boys who escape from a concentration-camp transport and flee into the surrounding woods, hostile terrain where the brute realities of survival coexist with dreams, memories, and fragments of visual poetry. – The Criterion Channel

Director: Jan Němec

Cast: Ladislav Janský, Antonín Kumbera

Country: Czechoslovakia

Distributor: Janus Films

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 1 hour, 8 minutes

Platform: The Criterion Channel

Special Programming: Classic Cinema

Dragon Inn (1967) | May 27, 11:00 am

After having the emperor’s minister of defense executed, a power-grabbing eunuch sends assassins to trail the victim’s children to a remote point on the northern Chinese border. But that bloodthirsty mission is confounded by a mysterious group of fighters who arrive on the scene, intent on delivering justice and defending the innocent. – The Criterion Channel

Director: King Hu

Cast: Shih Chun, Pai Ying, Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng, Miao Tien

Country: Taiwan, Hong Kong

Distributor: Janus Films

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 1 hour, 51 minutes

Platform: The Criterion Channel

Special Channel: Classic Cinema

Spirits of the Dead (1968) | May 26, 12:00 am

Three directors each adapt a Poe short story to the screen: “Toby Dammit” features a disheveled drugged and drunk English movie star who nods acceptance in the Italian press and his producers fawn over him. “Metzengerstein” features a Mediveal countess who has a love-hate relationship with a black stallion – who it turns out is really her dead lover. “William Wilson” tells the story of a sadistic Austrian student with an exact double whom he later kills. – Telescope Film

Director: Federico Fellini , Roger Vadim , Louis Malle

Cast: Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon, Jane Fonda, Terence Stamp

Country: France, Italy

Distributor: Janus Films

Rating: R

Runtime: 2 hours, 2 minutes

Platform: The Criterion Channel

Special Programming: Classic Cinema, Midnight Movies

Searching for Ingmar Bergman (2018) | May 25, 10:00 pm

A meaningful account of the personal and professional life of the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) that explores his film legacy, with interviews with his closest collaborators and a new generation of filmmakers. – JustWatch

Director: Margarethe von Trotta

Cast: Margarethe von Trotta, Olivier Assayas, Daniel Bergman, Ingmar Bergman Jr.

Country: Germany, France

Distributor: Oscilloscope

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 1 hour, 35 minutes

Platform: Kanopy

Special Programming: Classic Cinema, Documentary Cinema

The Koker Trilogy: Through the Olive Trees (1994) | May 25, 7:15 pm

Abbas Kiarostami takes metanarrative gamesmanship to masterful new heights in the final installment of The Koker Trilogy. Unfolding “behind the scenes” of And Life Goes On, this film traces the complications that arise when the romantic misfortune of one of the actors—a young man who pines for the woman cast as his wife, even though, in real life, she will have nothing to do with him—creates turmoil on set and leaves the hapless director caught in the middle. An ineffably lovely, gentle human comedy steeped in the folkways of Iranian village life, Through the Olive Trees peels away layer after layer of artifice as it investigates the elusive, alchemical relationship between cinema and reality. – The Criterion Channel

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Cast: Mohammad Ali Keshavarz, Farhad Kheradmand, Zarifeh Shiva

Country: Iran

Distributor: Janus Films

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 1 hour, 44 minutes

Platform: The Criterion Channel

Special Programming: Classic Cinema

Special Events: Filmmaker Conversations

Filmmaker Conversations

This conversation between Abbas Kiarostami and programmer Peter Scarlet is available to watch on The Criterion Channel.

The Koker Trilogy: And Life Goes On (1992) | May 25, 5:00 pm

In the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake in Iran that left fifty thousand dead, Abbas Kiarostami returned to Koker, where his camera surveys not only devastation but also the teeming life in its wake. Blending fiction and reality into a playful, poignant road movie, And Life Goes On follows a film director who, along with his son, makes the trek to the region in hopes of finding out if the young boys who acted in Where is the Friend’s House? are among the survivors, and discovers a resilient community pressing on in the face of tragedy. – The Criterion Channel

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Cast: Farhad Kheradmand, Pouya Payvar, Hossein Rezai

Country: Iran

Distributor: Janus Films

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 1 hour, 36 minutes

Platform: The Criterion Channel

Special Programming: Classic Cinema

The Koker Trilogy: Where is the Friend’s House? (1987) | May 25, 3:00 pm

The first film in Abbas Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing Koker Trilogy takes a simple premise—a boy searches for the home of his classmate, whose school notebook he has accidentally taken—and transforms it into a miraculous, child’s-eye adventure of the everyday. As our young hero zigzags determinedly across two towns, aided (and sometimes misdirected) by those he encounters, his quest becomes both a revealing portrait of rural Iranian society in all its richness and complexity and a touching parable about the meaning of personal responsibility. – The Criterion Channel

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Cast: Babek Ahmed Poor, Ahmed Ahmed Poor, Kheda Barech Defai, Iran Outari, Ait Ansari

Country: Iran

Distributor: Janus Films

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 1 hour, 24 minutes

Platform: The Criterion Channel

Special Programming: Classic Cinema

Blind Alley (1939) | May 25, 1:15 pm

One of the very first Hollywood films that could be described as a noir, this brisk psychological thriller stars Chester Morris as an inmate who escapes from prison and hides out in the home of a famed psychiatrist (Ralph Bellamy). As the hostage doctor begins analyzing his captor and dredges up the secrets of his troubled past, the tables gradually turn. – The Criterion Channel

Director: Charles Vidor

Cast: Chester Morris, Ralph Bellamy, Ann Dvorak

Country: United States

Distributor: Columbia Pictures

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 1 hour, 10 minutes

Platform: The Criterion Channel (Not currently available)

Special Programming: Classic Cinema