Fandor’s ever-increasing selection of well-curated films can be daunting for new and long-time subscribers alike, especially given the obscurity of most of the selections. With that in mind, we select five films every week available for streaming to promote for viewers who might be unfamiliar with the works in question, or unaware that movies they’ve had on watchlists are available for legal, high-quality viewing. Check out this week’s picks below.
Ivan the Terrible (Sergei Eisenstein)
Eisenstein’s final, and greatest, statement as a filmmaker was this two-part historical allegory in which one of the great Soviet propagandists crafted an obvious metaphor for Stalin’s reign of terror. Jagged, diagonal lines in composition stress Ivan’s ultimate, overwhelming power, but also his increasingly fractured, paranoid mental state, which creates self-fulfilling prophecies of conspiracy by making the leader so unbalanced that people cannot help but wish for his overthrow. An intended trilogy, Ivan was cut short by Stalin, who recognized the thinly veiled smear and suppressed accordingly, yet the two films that remain showcase one of cinema’s true innovators rallying for his last bow. The sheer kineticism of the films anticipates action cinema of the ‘80s and beyond more than it does the prestige biopic.
Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (Josephine Decker)
Decker’s one-two punch of a debut last year instantly placed her among the more aesthetically daring of the contemporary indie scene, and this gently escalating erotic thriller proves her chops beyond all reproach. Joe Swanberg plays a drifting worker who finds himself drawn to the clumsy but primal sexual advances of his boss’s daughter (Sophie Traub). Decker and cinematographer Ashley Connor trade in brightly lit, floating pillow shots that would recall Terrence Malick were they not so full of base malice. Sunlight has never looked so perversely beautiful as it does streaming through the gooey blood of a freshly decapitated frog, and even odd inserts like Traub hoisting up tools in a POV shot that sees her lift her skinny fists like antennas to heaven take on a sensual charge. A final act in which the farm’s lascivious patriarch (Robert Longstreet) can contain his jealousy no longer lurches into horror, but the film was scary long before he loses his composure.
Ne change rien (Pedro Costa)
Among the five or six best directors of his time, Costa has slowly dissolved the barriers between reality and fiction in his features, so describing this as one of his documentaries is a largely irrelevant distinction. As ever drawing upon the lessons he learned studying (and even filming) Straub-Huillet, Costa takes a material approach to his portrait of Jeanne Balibar, poring over the craft of songmaking and practice with a focus few music documentaries can match. But don’t overlook the beauty of the thing, all velvety black-and-white digital video, luminous in a way that few films are, much less documentaries. It’s a shame there aren’t more of Costa’s vital filmography on the site, but this overlooked gem is a good start for those looking either for where to go next after the Fontainhas trilogy, or those who cannot yet bring themselves to brave that monument.
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)
With Lanthimos’ latest film The Lobster earning hosannas at this year’s Cannes, it’s high time to take a look back at his arthouse hit, about a dysfunctional family ruled by a tyrannical cult leader of a father. Antiseptic whites dominate the color palette to suggest a hermetically sealed world, one so completely controlled that even words take on whatever meaning the patriarch assigns to them. Bitterly funny in its stark irony, the film nonetheless takes on added poignancy in the modern resurgence of reactionary fatherhood. It’s a domestic melodrama for the age of purity balls, a pressure cooker of enforced domicility that can only end in rupture.
A Talking Picture (Manoel de Oliveira)
It’s hard to believe that de Oliveira finally died this year, so immortal did the centenarian Portuguese filmmaker seem, and so rich and probing his late works. One of them, A Talking Picture, even had the political insistence of a decades-younger artist. Preempting Jean-Luc Godard’s own use of a cruise ship as a vessel for touring history, de Oliveira sets sail across the coastline of Western civilization in the lead-up to 9/11, along the way juxtaposing the past with the present to emphasize the unsustainably widening gyre between them. Dismissed by some reviews on release for the perceived conservatism of its literally explosive ending, today the film enjoys the opposite reputation, a sober, judging look at the effects of the 20th century by a man who lived through nearly all of it.
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