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With readers turning to their home viewing options more than ever, this daily feature provides one new movie each day worth checking out on a major streaming platform.

To fill the void left by the absence of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, for the next two weeks, this column will be dedicated to films that premiered at the festival over the course of seven decades.

Frenchman Marcel Camus’ 1959 work of audiovisual splendor, “Black Orpheus,” sets the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the slums of Rio de Janeiro during Carnaval. Based on the play, “Orfeu da Conceição,” by the Brazilian writer Vinicius de Moraes, the film, now streaming on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy, was quite literally a coming-out party for Brazil, albeit as a European-American curiosity. It was the first internationally acclaimed film to take place entirely in a favela, with an all-black Brazilian cast, and is...

Stars: Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn, Lourdes de Oliveira, Lea Garcia | Written by Marcel Camus, Vinicius de Moraes, Jacques Viot | Directed by Marcel Camus

Made in 1959 by the French filmmaker Marcel Camus, Black Orpheus is a Portuguese-language adaptation of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Here it is relocated to Rio de Janeiro, during Carnaval, which gives the impression that the city is in perennial party mode.

Orfeu (Breno Mello) is an eager young musician who happens to greet Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) as she arrives in Rio for the first time. Both are in an awkward position. Orfeu is facing a marriage to Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira), whom he doesn’t love. (He’d rather spend his money on a guitar than a wedding ring.) Eurydice is on the run from a stalker: a man dressed as Death.

It turns out Death has followed her to Rio. Orfeu chases him off,...

Marc Allégret: From André Gide lover to Simone Simon mentor (photo: Marc Allégret) (See previous post: "Simone Simon Remembered: Sex Kitten and Femme Fatale.") Simone Simon became a film star following the international critical and financial success of the 1934 romantic drama Lac aux Dames, directed by her self-appointed mentor – and alleged lover – Marc Allégret.[1] The son of an evangelical missionary, Marc Allégret (born on December 22, 1900, in Basel, Switzerland) was to have become a lawyer. At age 16, his life took a different path as a result of his romantic involvement – and elopement to London – with his mentor and later "adoptive uncle" André Gide (1947 Nobel Prize winner in Literature), more than 30 years his senior and married to Madeleine Rondeaux for more than two decades. In various forms – including a threesome with painter Théo Van Rysselberghe's daughter Elisabeth – the Allégret-Gide relationship remained steady until the late '20s and their trip to...

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,...

Every Sunday, Film School Rejects presents a movie that was made before you were born and tells you why you should like it. This week, Old Ass Movies presents the story of two star cross’d lovers who find themselves miles and years away from their origin. A retelling of the tragic Orpheus and Eurydice tale, Black Orpheus ditches the classical Greek setting and opts instead for the rich sights and sounds of Brazil during Carnaval. It’s a beautiful story set to unending drum-beats and a madness to which everyone succumbs. Black Orpheus (1959) Directed by: Marcel Camus Starring: Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn, Lourdes de Oliveira, Lea Garcia, and Adhemar da Silva Even though Orpheus (Breno Mello), a trolley driver, is engaged to be married to the beautiful and showy Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira), he’s not exactly enthusiastic about it. Sure, she can shake her God-given talents like no other woman in the whole city of...

As much as Criterion seems to love their austere period dramas, their extreme genre pushing pieces, and their black and white French coming of age films, every so often, they release, or in the case of Black Orpheus, re-release a film that takes the collection to a completely different place.

When looking at the collection as a whole, very few releases are as stand out as the 1959 Marcel Camus directed love letter to Brazil and it’s then ever growing art scene, Black Orpheus. Based on the legendary Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, takes the story, and plants it in the heart of a favela in Rio de Janeiro, during the then rarely filmed Carnaval, and follows Orfeo, a trolley conductor and aspiring musician, who is engaged to the lively and utterly breathtaking Mira. However, during Carnaval, after being chased from her home by a mysterious stalker dressed in a skeleton costume,...