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98% of interviews follow the same pleasantries-exchange / question-and-answer / pleasantries-exchange format, yet there are those rare times an incredible opportunity arrives. Which is to say that when I interviewed Paulo Branco at last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival I couldn’t have anticipated he––maybe the greatest producer in film history––would ask me to screen Manoel de Oliveira films that, per him, were receiving no notice from United States programmers. Just five months later I’m delighted to unveil Mirror of Life: Manoel de Oliveira 1996—2004, comprising ten features (and nine restorations debuting in North America) that will screen at Bam from March 28 to April 3.

Featuring John Malkovich, Michel Piccoli, Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni, and (of course) Ricardo Trêpa, the program finds Oliveira, who turned 90 during this time, in a period both decadent and reflective––note the Word and Utopia / Porto of My Childhood double-feature or 2001’s I’m Going Home...

Following Main Slate and Spotlight, the 61st New York Film Festival has unveiled its Revivals lineup, featuring new restorations of classic and overlooked films. Highlights include Manoel de Oliveira’s Abraham’s Valley, Jean Renoir‘s The Woman on the Beach, Bahram Beyzaie’s The Stranger and the Fog, Abel Gance’s La Roue, Paul Vecchiali’s The Strangler, Lee Grant’s Tell Me a Riddle, Nancy Savoca’s Household Saints, Horace Ové’s Pressure, and more.

“This year’s edition of Revivals is a thrilling showcase of cinema history, packed with groundbreaking discoveries and long unseen classics alike, all in outstanding restorations,” said Florence Almozini, Senior Director of Programming at Film at Lincoln Center and NYFF Revivals Programmer. “We never cease to be amazed at the lasting influence of these cinematic gems on our collective sense of cinema, with the way they have tackled cultural, societal, or political issues with such modernity and artistry.

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.

Alice (Josephine Mackerras)

It makes no sense. The night before saw Alice Ferrand’s (Emilie Piponnier) husband François (Martin Swabey) going out of his way to passionately make-out with her in front of their friends at a dinner party and now he won’t answer her calls. Despite his running out of the house earlier than usual without any explanation, however, there’s nothing to make her think something is wrong until a trip to the drugstore exposes a freeze on their finances. One credit card won’t work. Then another. The Atm won’t accept her sign-in and François still isn’t picking up his phone. Alice has no other option but to set a meeting with the bank and figure...

Cinematic representations of passion usually involve hot color schemes, sweaty images and fiery emotions, symbols of riveting and uncontrollable desire. In his 1981 masterpiece Francisca, a sprawling adaptation of Agustina Bessa-Luís’s novel Fanny Owen—itself based on true events—master filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira devilishly internalizes these melodramatic tropes, draping them in the opulent textures, swirling mustaches, and snooty stubbornness of 1850s high-society Portugal. Its key characters speak of love and lust, but each remains more beholden to the rigorous expectations of social protocols than anything else.

Their repressed emotions are left to stagnate as time passes. Free-spiritedness cannot exist in such a suspended state of ornate equilibrium, and so life becomes nothing more than mechanized routine. Like many of his generation, twenty-something José Agusto (Diogo Dória) has grown up in a state of national volatility, as Portugal transitions from the reign of Dom João VI to a society split between “liberalism and absolutism,...

"We were speaking about the infinite, about love and magnetism..." Grasshopper Film has released a new trailer for a 4K restoration of a Portuguese biographical epic called Francisca, from acclaimed filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira. Camilo Castelo Branco, the author of the novel from which Oliveira adapted Doomed Love, also emerged as a character in the director's next film—Francisca—a sinister, absorbing portrait of a mutually destructive love affair. Oliveira's source text for Francisca was a novel by Agustina Bessa-Luís: the book's re-telling of a troubled passage in Camilo's life, his friend José Augusto (Diogo Dória) embarked on a perverse game of marital cat and mouse with Francisca (Teresa Menezes), the woman the novelist loved, led Oliveira to new levels of stylistic and formal imagination. With its elaborate title cards, its abundance of shots in which the action is oriented directly toward the camera, its gloomy interiors, and its show-stopping gala set-pieces,...

A Portuguese Woman“It doesn’t really matter where things come from. What matters is picking things up again, mess them up, try to push them forward in a different way. All of us do it, we’ve all been doing it all through time, and things haven’t really changed that much since Greece. What we can try is to do something that seems to be new, or that is shown in a whole different way—even if not necessarily intentionally.”In a way, that’s what Rita Azevedo Gomes has been doing through her career as a filmmaker. A career, avowedly, somewhat confidential—her latest fiction, The Portuguese Woman, is only her 9th film since her 1990 debut O Som da Terra a Tremer—but one that has been quietly snowballing since 2012’s The Revenge of a Woman, to her own surprise, became a firm festival favorite. Her 2016 poetic...

Há Terra!I want to apologize for providing this Wavelengths avant-garde preview a little later than I might've liked. Hell, given that it's been over a week since movies died, I'm not exactly sure how much more kindling I can chuck onto the pyre. But I should remark that compared with previous years' iterations of the Tiff Wavelengths series, 2016 does feel a bit...off. I'm chiefly referring to the experimental short films here. (My second part, addressing the Wavelengths features, will be along in a matter of days.) Make no mistake. There's plenty of great work in this year's programs. But I do feel that the disparity this year between the truly exceptional films and the mediocre-to-not-very-good ones is markedly high.I enjoy films, and more than this, I enjoy enjoying them. I hardly get my kicks by being a nattering nabob of negativity. But programmers have to work with what is available to them,...

The ghosts did not take long to present themselves. Oliveira's seventh feature, Visita ou Memórias e Confissões, conveys a bevy of autobiographical musings on his family house and himself. Filmed in 1981 when he was 73, yet shelved voluntarily until after his death, Memories and Confessions has since become a kind of talisman for the director, an n+1 variable where the n is his 31-item back catalogue cut short last year. The first character introduced in the movie is a magnolia that blooms twice a year—first in "a rapid blossoming," then in the shape of "a rare star of maturity." Conveniently, the film's structure comprises just what the original title enumerates: a visit, some memories, a handful of confessions. The visitors in question are a man and a woman whom we do not get to see but whose voices we keep hearing off-screen. As they drop in at an empty house...

The festival stretches its arms today and breaths a big sigh of relief: the Cannes Marché is ending, the business types fleeing the Palais des Festivals, the Croisette and Cannes, far away from any such shuddered utterances as "Apichatpong," "Hou," or "Porumboiu." God forbid! The festival thus empties out a bit, making queues shorter, the time one can sleep in the morning precious minutes longer. The suits are replaced by regular tourists, from cruises or from the country, and the town loses a bit of its charged, schizophrenic character with this exchange, because, let's admit, the commotion money brings with it is usually a spectacle to behold. And without the money, what is Cannes?Romanian New Wave director Corneliu Porumbiou asks something related in The Treasure, one of the festival's best and a real pleasure in these last dwindling days. As slim, funny and diagrammed as a Hong Sang-soo comedy...