A change of season has us craving fresh visions, and this March on the Criterion Channel, we’re excited to spotlight artists whose work innovates new forms. From the groundbreaking film scores of Quincy Jones, to Andrei Tarkovsky’s metaphysical epics, to the aesthetic inventions of the German expressionists, to Liliana Cavani’s transgressive sexual power plays, to the radically immersive documentaries from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab—if you’re looking for new experiences on-screen, get started with our March lineup.

Also playing are tributes to the ravishing Rita Hayworth and the iconic Catherine Deneuve, the films of Kathleen Collins, Sally Potter’s Orlando, favorites by Terry Zwigoff and Peter Bogdanovich, the exclusive streaming premiere of Dominga Sotomayor’s Too Late to Die Young, and a new episode of Adventures in Moviegoing with Patton Oswalt. If you haven’t signed up yet, head to CriterionChannel.com and get a 14-day free trial! * indicates programming available starting April 1

** indicates programming available only in the U.S.



SUNDAY, MARCH 1

Scores by Quincy Jones

Few musicians have had such a profound effect on the evolution of twentieth-century popular music as legendary record producer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and twenty-eight-time Grammy winner Quincy Jones. After establishing his virtuoso versatility arranging for greats like Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington, Jones went on to a hugely successful career as a film composer at a time when Hollywood was still largely inhospitable to black artists. Featuring: The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1964)*, The Slender Thread (Sydney Pollack, 1965), The Deadly Affair (Sidney Lumet, 1967), In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, 1967), In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967), A Dandy in Aspic (Anthony Mann, 1968), Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (Paul Mazursky, 1969), Cactus Flower (Gene Saks, 1969), The Italian Job (Peter Collinson, 1969), Mackenna’s Gold (J. Lee Thompson, 1969), They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (Gordon Douglas, 1970), The Out-of-Towners (Arthur Hiller, 1970), $ (Richard Brooks, 1971), The Anderson Tapes (Sidney Lumet, 1971), Brother John (James Goldstone, 1971), The Getaway (Sam Peckinpah, 1972)



MONDAY, MARCH 2

Triple Play

Batter up! With opening day just around the corner, we’ve stacked the bench with a trio of baseball-themed favorites from Hollywood’s golden age.



Featuring: Take Me Out to the Ballgame (Busby Berkeley, 1949), Kill the Umpire (Lloyd Bacon, 1950), Angels in the Outfield (Clarence Brown, 1951)





The Daytrippers (Greg Mottola, 1996)

Criterion Collection Edition #1001







TUESDAY, MARCH 3

Short + Feature: Moving Pictures

24 Frames per Second and 24 Frames



Commissioned to accompany an exhibit of Persian paintings and textiles, Shirley Clarke’s experimental short is a kaleidoscope of quick cuts and beautiful details, making for a kinetic companion to Abbas Kiarostami’s sublimely meditative swan song.







WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4

Too Late to Die Young

Exclusive streaming premiere, featuring a conversation with director Dominga Sotomayor



Dominga Sotomayor’s intoxicating teenage daydream floats by in a haze of gorgeously gauzy images that capture a young woman’s coming-of-age in the midst of Chile’s tumultuous transition to democracy.







THURSDAY, MARCH 5

Patton Oswalt’s Adventures in Moviegoing



For five years in the 1990s, comedian and actor Patton Oswalt lived a double life as a movie junkie, a habit he picked up at the famed Los Angeles repertory house the New Beverley and which he documents in his memoir, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, Oswalt sits down with Alicia Malone to discuss the origins of his cinemania as well as some of his all-time favorite films, including a pair of Japanese New Wave crime dramas, a landmark concert documentary, and Kelly Reichardt’s revelatory breakout feature.

Featuring: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943), The Warped Ones (Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1960), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964), A Colt Is My Passport (Takashi Nomura, 1967), Gimme Shelter (Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin, 1970), Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976), Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006)







FRIDAY, MARCH 6

Directed by Kelly Reichardt

To celebrate of the release of her latest film, First Cow, four of the most acclaimed films from Criterion favorite Kelly Reichardt return to the Channel, along with a Masterclass in which the fiercely independent director explores her working methods in an interview with critic April Wolfe. Featuring: River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010)



Double Feature: Going Nuclear

Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb The doomsday clock ticks ominously in these urgent Cold War wake-up calls, one deadly serious, the other morbidly funny.





SATURDAY, MARCH 7

Saturday Matinee: Young Sherlock Holmes

A captivating, boys’-own-adventure spin on the iconic character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, this Victorian fantasy, produced by Steven Spielberg, follows the teenage Sherlock Holmes and his faithful sidekick John Watson as they team up to solve their first mystery.



SUNDAY, MARCH 8

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

Featuring Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, a 1988 documentary In a string of visionary films that challenged the audience’s perceptions of time and space, Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky created a cinematic language all his own, one in which weighty philosophical themes found expression in images of haunting, spectral beauty. Ranging from the transcendent medieval drama to meditative sci-fi epics, his enormously influential masterpieces are consistent in their astonishing ambition and profound insights into spirituality and metaphysical experience. Featuring: The Steamroller and the Violin (1961), Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1975), Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983), The Sacrifice (1986)



MONDAY, MARCH 9

Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)

Criterion Collection Edition #739



3:10 to Yuma (Delmer Daves, 1957)

Criterion Collection Edition #657



TUESDAY, MARCH 10

Short + Feature: Get Thee to a Nunnery!

Aves and The Nun Shot through with a surreal mysticism, Nietzchka Keene’s hypnotic short about a cloistered nun is a sister to Jacques Rivette’s controversial, once-banned French New Wave landmark, starring Anna Karina.





Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life (1971, 1972, 1974)

Criterion Collection Edition #631







WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11

Orlando Based on Virginia Woolf’s 1928 classic Orlando: A Biography, Sally Potter’s sumptuous fantasy stars a sublime Tilda Swinton as the eponymous seventeenth-century nobleman who, commanded by Queen Elizabeth I (played by legendary raconteur Quentin Crisp) to never age, voyages through four hundred years of English history, first as a man, then as a woman.







THURSDAY, MARCH 12

Three by Peter Bogdanovich One of the most preternaturally talented of the movie-brat auteurs to emerge from the New Hollywood of the 1960s, cinephile-turned-director Peter Bogdanovich began his career on a remarkable high note with a string of critical successes. These early triumphs are testaments to the out-of-the-gate brilliance of a filmmaker who exemplified the auteur-driven creative freedom of the New American Cinema.



Featuring: Targets (1968), The Last Picture Show (1971), Paper Moon (1973)







FRIDAY, MARCH 13

Double Feature: Read All About It!

The Front Page and His Girl Friday Directed with pre-Code verve by Lewis Milestone, the first screen adaptation of The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur stars Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brien as a newspaper editor and his ace reporter. For his whirlwind remake, director Howard Hawks had the O’Brien role rewritten for Rosalind Russell, who stars opposite Cary Grant in one of the funniest, fastest-talking screwball comedies of the 1940s.







SATURDAY, MARCH 14

Saturday Matinee: Hans Christian Andersen Danny Kaye brings his infectious warmth and humor to this spectacular musical fantasy about the legendary spinner of fairy tales. Incorporating a host of the writer’s immortal tales—including “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and “The Little Mermaid”—this beloved classic brings Andersen’s storybook world to enchanting life.







SUNDAY, MARCH 15

Starring Rita Hayworth

Featuring a new introduction by critic Farran Smith Nehme Dubbed “The Love Goddess” for her glamorous image and knockout screen presence, Rita Hayworth was the shining jewel in the crown of Columbia Pictures, the studio over which she reigned as undisputed queen throughout the 1940s. This selection of some of Hayworth’s most unforgettable films showcases the vitality, exuberance, and captivating allure that made her the very definition of a movie star.

Featuring: Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939), Angels over Broadway (Ben Hecht and Lee Garmes, 1940)*, The Strawberry Blonde (Raoul Walsh, 1941)*, You’ll Never Get Rich (Sidney Lanfield, 1941), You Were Never Lovelier (William A. Seiter, 1942), Cover Girl (Charles Vidor, 1944), Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947), Down to Earth (Alexander Hall, 1947)*, Affair in Trinidad (Vincent Sherman, 1952)*, Salome (William Dieterle, 1953)*, Pal Joey (George Sidney, 1957), Separate Tables (Delbert Mann, 1958)







MONDAY, MARCH 16

Observations on Film Art No. 35: In the Service of Horror—The Lyrical Cinematography of Picnic at Hanging Rock Though its premise is not far removed from that of a straightforward horror movie, Peter Weir’s Australian New Wave classic forgoes conventional shocks in favor of an eerie, otherworldly languor that’s closer to the moody atmospherics of an art film. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor Kristin Thompson illustrates how Weir uses soft-focus cinematography, slow motion, and superimpositions to cast an ethereal, enigmatic spell that has tantalized viewers for decades.







TUESDAY, MARCH 17

Short + Feature: Express Yourself

Would You Look at Her and Tomboy A new generation challenges restrictive gender norms in these sensitive coming-of-age journeys that feature a rebellious young girl and a gender nonconforming child testing the waters of new identities.







WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18

Directed by Kathleen Collins

Featuring an archival interview with the filmmaker

Trailblazing independent filmmaker Kathleen Collins was just forty-six at the time of her sudden death, but she left behind a rich legacy as a writer, academic, and filmmaker. This program presents her masterpiece Losing Ground, a perceptive portrait of a marriage at a crossroads, alongside the short feature The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy. Taken together, these landmark works reveal a talent of unique vision and intelligence whose films offer sophisticated takes on racial and gender politics as well as philosophical insights on love and creativity.

Featuring: The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980), Losing Ground (1982)







THURSDAY, MARCH 19

Three Documentaries from the Sensory Ethnography Lab

Experience documentary as you never have before with these viscerally immersive works from Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. Since 2006, the SEL, under the direction of Lucien Castaing-Taylor, has pioneered a radically innovative form of filmmaking that merges audiovisual experimentation and ethnographic observation to create mesmerizing meditations on nature, landscapes, and human cultures. Encompassing a hypnotic journey of three thousand sheep, an exhilarating oceanic odyssey, and a daring inquiry into the ultimate taboo, these stunningly kinetic films are bracing explorations of the world we live in.



Featuring: Sweetgrass (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, 2009), Leviathan (Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2012)**, Caniba (Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2017)







FRIDAY, MARCH 20

Double Feature: Thoroughly Modern Malaise

The Passenger** and Identification of a Woman

These late-career riddles from Michelangelo Antonioni—one a quasi-thriller starring Jack Nicholson, the other a tantalizing antiromance—both revolve around mysteries, unresolved secrets, and the search for someone who may hold the answers. Just don’t expect any tidy resolutions . . .







SATURDAY, MARCH 21

Saturday Matinee: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen Terry Gilliam’s lavish fantasy bursts with wit, invention, and eye-popping imagery as it brings to life the fantastical exploits of the eponymous eighteenth-century German adventurer whose journeys take him from the belly of a sea monster to the moon and beyond.







SUNDAY, MARCH 22

German Expressionism

Physical reality warps and bends to fit the twisted psychological states on display in the cinema of the German expressionist movement of the 1920s. With their emphasis on exaggerated shadows, off-kilter camera angles, dreamlike sets, and macabre storylines, these movies paved the way for the aesthetics of both horror cinema and film noir, genres in which mood and atmosphere take precedence over realism.

Featuring: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), The Golem (Carl Boese and Paul Wegener, 1920), Destiny (Fritz Lang, 1921), Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (Fritz Lang, 1922), Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922), The Hands of Orlac (Robert Wiene, 1924), Varieté (E. A. Dupont, 1925), Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), M (Fritz Lang, 1931), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933)







MONDAY, MARCH 23

Directed by Terry Zwigoff

The great counterculture curmudgeon of American independent cinema, Terry Zwigoff makes refreshingly cynical films populated by misfits, losers, and alienated geniuses. Jaded odes to eccentricity in an overly slick pop-culture wasteland, Zwigoff’s films are hilariously acerbic yet graced with an undeniable affection for their oddball antiheroes.

Featuring: Louie Bluie (1985), Crumb (1994), Ghost World (2001), Art School Confidential (2006)







TUESDAY, MARCH 24

Short + Feature: Send in the Clowns

24 Hours in the Life of a Clown and La strada Two legendary directors explore the human condition through the laughter and tears of a clown—Jean-Pierre Melville in his debut short and Federico Fellini in his poetic masterpiece.







WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25

Three by Liliana Cavani

Transgressive, unflinching, and explosively controversial, the films of Liliana Cavani explore history, war, and trauma with taboo-shattering fearlessness and psychological intensity.

Featuring: Women of the Resistance (1965), The Night Porter (1974), The Skin (1981)







THURSDAY, MARCH 26

The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Karel Reisz, 1981)

Criterion Collection Edition #768







FRIDAY, MARCH 27

Double Feature: Remembrances of Cities Past

Of Time and the City** and My Winnipeg Two idiosyncratic auteurs, Terence Davies and Guy Maddin, revisit the worlds of their childhood in these elegiac explorations of memory and place.







SATURDAY, MARCH 28

Saturday Matinee: Fly Away Home The Black Stallion director Carroll Ballard crafts another richly expressive look at the bond between children and animals, featuring luminous cinematography and touching performances from Anna Paquin and Jeff Daniels.







SUNDAY, MARCH 29

Starring Catherine Deneuve

For nearly six decades, Catherine Deneuve has been the face of French cinema, the embodiment of its sophistication, allure, and cool glamour. Following her star-making turn in Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Deneuve’s porcelain beauty and aloof elegance caught the attention of some of the most renowned European directors of the 1960s and ’70s, including Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut, and Roman Polanski, all of whom could only begin to scratch the surface of her enigmatic magnetism. Since then, Deneuve has continued to entrance a new generation of post–New Wave French filmmakers like André Téchiné and Arnaud Desplechin, confirming her status as the reigning grande dame of Gallic cinema.

Featuring: Vice and Virtue (Roger Vadim, 1963), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964), Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965), Belle de jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967), The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967), Mississippi Mermaid (François Truffaut, 1969), Donkey Skin (Jacques Demy, 1970), Tristana (Luis Buñuel, 1970), Un flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972), A Slightly Pregnant Man (Jacques Demy, 1973), The Last Metro (François Truffaut, 1980), The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983), The Young Girls Turn 25 (Agnès Varda, 1993), A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008), The Girl on the Train (André Téchiné, 2009)**, On My Way (Emmanuelle Bercot, 2013)**







MONDAY, MARCH 30

On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)

Criterion Collection Edition #647







TUESDAY, MARCH 31

Short + Feature: A Woman’s Place

Counterfeit Kunkoo and Charulata

These subtly radical tales of feminist awakening from Reema Sengupta and Satyajit Ray explore what it means to be an independent woman in Indian society.