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Though it didn’t inaugurate the French New Wave, François Truffaut’s 1959 debut feature, The 400 Blows, did herald the true arrival of the movement, netting the critic turned filmmaker a best director award at the Cannes Film Festival and rave reviews around the globe. Drawing heavily from his own childhood, as well as inspiration from Italian neorealism and 1950s Hollywood melodramas such as Rebel Without a Cause, Truffaut charts the antics of bright but unruly misfit Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who, without a sense of purpose, consistently gets into trouble with teachers and his parents.

Truffaut’s kinetic and restless camera style is keyed to the boundless energy of youth, and even the most carefully blocked and framed shots have a feel of spontaneity to them. But The 400 Blows ultimately belongs to Léaud. Flashing hints of innocence and yearning that recall James Dean’s smoldering intensity, the 14-year-old...

Well we all knew this would happen. Back in February, when Criterion announced their epic digital streaming partnership with Hulu, they also quietly revealed that their streaming options on Netflix would be coming to an end over the course of the next year. While I haven’t been paying close attention to the Criterion Collection films that have been expiring since that announcement was made, I thought it would be helpful to all of you loyal Netflix subscribers to know that in about twelve days, 26 titles will be expiring on the 26th of May, 2011.

I’ve gone and linked to all of the titles below, so you can click on the cover art or the text, and be taken to their corresponding Netflix pages. While this isn’t everything that Criterion has to offer on Netflix, it is a nice chunk of really important films. If you don’t currently have a Netflix subscription,...

勝手にしやがれ (Katte Ni Shiyagare)

In François Truffaut’s fourth episode of the Antoine Doinel saga, Bed and Board (1970), Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) embarks on an affair with a Japanese woman, Kyoko (Hiroko Berghauer), culminating in a restaurant sequence in which Antoine keeps excusing himself to call his wife Christine (Claude Jade). Kyoko exits the restaurant, leaving a small piece of paper on which she’s written, in kanji, ‘katte ni shiyagare,’ a declaration of frustration and independence, of having had enough, which can be translated politely, as above, as well as in a far more casual manner. Antoine is unable to read this of course, it suffices that she’s gone. In Truffaut’s film, this subtitle appears on the shot of the brief note, ‘va te faire foutre’/'go to hell'. What French audiences at the time did not know at the time was that this Japanese expression was also...