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Martin Scorsese is no stranger to The Criterion Collection, but that doesn’t make the announcement that his period drama “The Age of Innocence” will be officially joining the club in March 2018 any less exciting. Scorsese’s 1993 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s seminal novel will join other Scorsese films like “The Last Temptation of Christ” in the Collection.

Read More:‘Silence of the Lambs,’ ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ and More Join Criterion Collection in February 2018

“Innocence” is one of six new movies coming to Criterion in March 2018. Other new additions include Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece “The Passion of Joan of Arc” and Volker Schlöndorff’s largely-unseen “Baal.” You can head over to The Criterion Collection website to pre-order the titles now. Check out all the new additions below. Synopses provided by Criterion.

“Elevator to the Gallows”

For his feature debut, twenty-four-year-old Louis Malle brought together a mesmerizing performance by Jeanne Moreau,...

Jeanne Moreau, a legend of French cinema and one of the French New Wave's leading actresses with roles in Jules & Jim and Elevator to the Gallows, died this weekend at the age of 89.

French authorities confirmed that the actress died at her Paris home; no cause of death was revealed, the BBC reports.

French president Emmanuel Macron tweeted of Moreau, "A legend of cinema and theater … an actress engaged in the whirlwind of life with an absolute freedom."

Pierre Lescure, president of the Cannes Film Festival, said in a statement,...

Aki Kaurismäki’s tale of a Syrian refugee who stows away to Finland mines the deadpan humour he’s famous for while refusing to flinch from heartbreak and hardship

The movies of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, with their deadpan drollery and aquarium light, have long been a habit-forming pleasure. But increasingly they are something else, or something more. The issue of migrants and refugees from the Middle East may still be something from which cinema mostly averts its gaze. Not Kaurismäki’s cinema. With his previous film Le Havre, and this very sympathetic and charming new work, The Other Side of Hope, Kaurismäki has made refugees his focus – and done so without appearing to change style or tonal tack. His humane comedy, with its air of unworldly absurdity, has absorbed this idea, but not undermined its seriousness in any way, in fact embraced it with almost miraculous ease and simplicity.

Editor’s Note: This article is presented in partnership with FilmStruck. The exclusive streaming home for The Criterion Collection, FilmStruck features the largest streaming library of contemporary and classic arthouse, indie, foreign and cult films as well as extensive bonus content, filmmaker interviews and rare footage. Learn more here.

Todd Haynes is one of the most distinct voices working in film today. He’s also a cinematic chameleon. For every period film Haynes makes, he and his team of craftsman adapt not only the look of the movies or photography of that era, but the visual language as well.

For example, both “Carol” and “Far from Heaven” are Haynes films set in ’50s-era America, but they are worlds apart. While “Carol” got its color palette and sense of composition from the photographers like Saul Leiter who documented the period, “Far From Heaven” recreated the manufactured studio look of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas of that era.

Aged just 37, the German director and relentless provocateur died too soon, but he left behind a biting body of work for us to remember him by

Related: Berlin 2015 review – To Love Without Demands: the torrid life and work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The 35th anniversary of the death of Rainer Werner Fassbinder this year was grimly presaged two weeks ago by the death of his longtime, long-suffering cameraman Michael Ballhaus. Ballhaus was 81 and had forged a second career in Hollywood. Fassbinder, had he lived, would be 71. Having knocked out 40 features, several TV series, countless plays and adaptations in a 13-year career, one can only wonder what he might have done with another 35.

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What Are You Watching? is a weekly space for The A.V Club’s film critics and readers to share their thoughts, observations, and opinions on movies new and old.

My crush on Michael Ballhaus’ camerawork started with the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I love their fucked-up aesthetics: the funky typefaces and hairdos; the ugly German housing; the warbled theme songs; the mirror-window obsession; the severe, theatrical blocking; the physiognomies of his makeshift family of regular actors, who all look a little off in memorable ways, their faces painted over with too much make-up. Ballhaus was one of three Fassbinder cinematographers, the others being Dietrich Lohmann and Xavier Schwarzenberger. Really, the two didn’t have a lot in common. Fassbinder was a wunderkind—all of 25 and already on his 10th feature when he met Ballhaus—with a miserable postwar upbringing, two facts that seemed to have inspired both ...

Cinematographer who brought dynamism to the films of Scorsese and Fassbinder

The cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who has died aged 81, helped to realise the work of two visionaries: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with whom he made 15 films, and Martin Scorsese, for whom he shot seven, including the gruesome gangster drama Goodfellas (1990), which tested this exceedingly gentle man’s tolerance of violence. “I wouldn’t have done this movie with another director,” he said in 2010. “These discussions – whether there is enough brain in the blood – are so absurd that you almost want to throw up.” Their other pictures together included the lustrous Edith Wharton adaptation The Age of Innocence (1993), the grand-and-grubby period piece Gangs of New York (2002) and the thriller The Departed (2006), which won the best picture Oscar.

Much of the visual dynamism associated with Fassbinder and Scorsese must be credited also to Ballhaus. There are the complicated but elegant compositions in Fassbinder,...

Michael Ballhaus, the revered cinematographer who brought his distinct visual sense to the works of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, has died at 81. The German director of photography earned three Academy Award nominations throughout his career, which spanned more than half a century. Last year he was recognized with a Golden Bear for lifetime achievement at the Berlin Film Festival.

Among his best-known films were Fassbinder’s “The Marriage of Maria Braun,” James L. Brooks’ “Broadcast News” (which earned him his first Oscar nod) and “The Departed,” one of several collaborations with Scorsese — Ballhaus also lensed “After Hours,” “The Last Temptations of Christ,” “Goodfellas” and “The Age of Innocence.” He began his career in Germany, first coming to attention for the many films he made with Fassbinder, before making his way to Hollywood.

Once there, he also worked with Mike Nichols (“Working Girl,” “Postcards From the Edge”), Robert Redford (“Quiz Show”) and Barry Levinson (“Sleepers”), among many others. Ballhaus was born in Berlin on August 5, 1935. His cause of death has yet to be confirmed.

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder made more than 40 features in his 37 years on this planet, 23 of which starred Hanna Schygulla. The two first met in their early 20s when they were attending acting school in Munich, hitting it off instantly: “It suddenly became crystal clear to me that Hanna Schygulla would one day be the star of my films,” the New German Cinema stalwart wrote. “Maybe even something like their driving force.”

Schygulla was recently interviewed by the Guardian on the eve of an extensive BFI retrospective dedicated to Fassbinder, referring to herself as “one of the survivors” of the “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” and “The Marriage of Maria Braun” director.

Read More: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Top 10 Favorite Films

“He had a strong smell about him,” she recalls. “He smelled how he looked. Like a spotty rebel filled with angst.” Fassbinder, who died of an overdose in 1982, cast the actress in his debut film.

He tormented his actors, threw drinks at his cameraman, and died of an overdose at 37, leaving behind two dead lovers – and an extraordinary body of work. As a Fassbinder season begins at the BFI, Hanna Schygulla reveals how she survived

It is 35 years since the magnificent and monstrous director Rainer Werner Fassbinder died from a drugs overdose. His addiction to alcohol and cocaine was as widely known as his bisexuality, and his propensity for cruelly manipulating anyone who entered his orbit. Though he was just 37 years old at the time of his death, he had already made more than 40 features: most famously Fear Eats the Soul, a melodrama about a German widow who falls for an Arab immigrant more than 20 years her junior; Fox and His Friends, starring Fassbinder himself as a gauche carnival worker exploited by his boyfriend; and The Marriage of Maria Braun, in which a single-minded newlywed...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) is showing March 28 - April 27, 2017 in the United Kingdom in the series Fassbinder: The Exploitability of Feelings.By now many will have encountered Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (German: Angst essen Seele auf, 1974) even if they are not hardcore devotees of the director’s oeuvre. Along with his Brd trilogy, Ali stands as one of Fassbinder’s most acclaimed and viewed works. The film follows 60-year-old cleaning woman Emmi (Brigitte Mira) who becomes involved with much younger Moroccan mechanic Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) after one of his friends dares him to dance with her when she walks alone into the bar one rainy evening. Ali has been frequently praised for the moving performances of its leads and for how it so effectively portrays...

Noah Baumbach has never seen “Withnail and I.” Kenneth Lonergan has always wanted to see “Yi Yi.” Sandra Bernhard hasn’t had the chance to catch “Lola.” As part of New York City’s Quad Cinema’s newly announced “First Encounters” screening series, they (and more creative types) are going to finally remedy that — and they’d like you to join them.

The newly revamped four-screen theater — set to reopen in less than in a month — has announced the first lineup of their newest series, which sees notable New Yorkers (helped by programmers Christopher Wells and Gavin Smith) picking a film they’ve never seen (but have always wanted to) to show on the big screen, complete with a post-showing Q&A with the rest of audience.

Check out the first official lineup for First Encounters below, with descriptions and other information provided by Quad Cinema.

Read More: New York...

Early in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1975 film Fox and His Friends, the naive protagonist Franz Biberkopf (played by Fassbinder himself) shows he’s not quite as naive or, at least, not quite as innocent as we may be led to believe through the remainder of the film. Biberkopf, who goes by the nickname Fox, plays the lottery as if it’s some religious ritual, filled with hope and faith that his fortunes will change quickly when change sees it’s fit to come his way. Fretful because he doesn’t have the money to purchase his ticket, Fox carries out a swindle so naturally that he’s surely done it before. Or perhaps Fassbinder is saying this is natural because this is just how humans behave. In either case, Fox enters a flower shop, flirts lightly with the gay florist in order to gain trust and instill desire, and then...

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Courtesy of Janus Film.On the occasion of a comprehensive retrospective the Tiff Bell Lightbox (October 28 - December 23), the need to summarize the thirty plus films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder seems not just daunting, but reductive. How to simplify someone who both evolved and contradicted himself? While typically turning out three films per year between 1966 and his death in 1982, the year 1974 seems like one of the German director’s most unified, at least in terms of one preoccupation: marriage. This particular year seems as possibly a mid-way between Fassbinder’s working out-the-kinks genre exercises (The American Soldier, Love Is Colder Than Death) and the later, lavish international co-productions based on esteemed literary works (Despair, Querelle). The diversity upon which the holy union is depicted can be detected if just judging by each of the three’s own source material; Ali: Fear Eats the Soul a...

The Criterion Collection has announced its slate for January, 2017, with offerings from Howard Hawks (“His Girl Friday”), Rainer Werner Fassbender (“Fox and His Friends”), Jack Garfein (“Something Wild”), and Ousmane Sembène (“Black Girl”). Check out the covers for the films below as well as synopses provided by the Criterion Collection. For more information on the special features and technical specs of each of these films, visit the Criterion Collection website.

Read More: The Criterion Collection Announces December Titles: ‘Heart of a Dog,’ ‘The Exterminating Angel’ and More

“His Girl Friday” (Available January 10)

One of the fastest, funniest, and most quotable films ever made, “His Girl Friday” stars Rosalind Russell as reporter Hildy Johnson, a standout among cinema’s powerful women. Hildy is matched in force only by her conniving but charismatic editor and ex-husband, Walter Burns (played by the peerless Cary Grant), who dangles the chance for her to scoop...

Arthouse film fans will know the name Rainer Werner Fassbinder as one of the great guiding lights of the German new wave in the '70s and '80s. However, he also acted quite a bit throughout those years, mostly in his own films, but occasionally in films by other directors with whom he felt comfortable. His final onscreen performance in Wolf Gremm's Kamikaze '89 may just be the craziest thing Fassbinder ever did as an actor, and that's saying something. Wolf Gremm was a director with little mainstream success at the multiplex. He only made a handful of theatrical features in the '70s and '80s before refocusing his career on TV movies from 1982 through 2011. In fact, KamiKaze '89 was his final theatrical feature, and...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Award Winning Director Wolfgang Becker (“Good Bye Lenin!”) will open the festival at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre with “Me and Kaminski” bringing outstanding German cinema and its stars to Los Angeles from October 20 to 23rd.

Full Program Line Up Announced with a selection of the best new German, Austrian and Swiss Cinema

Celebrating its 10th year, German Currents features an expanded program including screenings of ten La premieres, conversations with prolific German directors, writers and actors, as well as the return of the free family matinee film screening for local schools.

“Me and Kaminski” starring Daniel Brühl and directed by Wolfgang Becker

2016 has been a successful year for German language cinema, not only in Europe, but across the globe. Beginning on Thursday, October 20th 2016 German Currents will open this year’s 4 day festival with the red carpet event Los Angeles premiere of Wolfgang Becker’s (“Goodbye Lenin”) five-time...

A major talent of the New German Cinema finds his footing out on the open highway, in a trio of intensely creative pictures that capture the pace and feel of living off the beaten path. All three star Rüdiger Vogler, an actor who could be director Wim Wenders' alter ego. Wim Wenders' The Road Trilogy Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 813 1974-1976 / B&W and Color / 1:66 widescreen / 113, 104, 176 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date May 30, 2016 / 99.95 Starring Rüdiger Vogler, Lisa Kreuzer, Yetta Rottländer; Hannah Schygulla, Nasstasja Kinski, Hans Christian Blech, Ivan Desny; Robert Zischler. Cinematography Robby Müller, Martin Schäfer Film Editor Peter Przygodda, Barbara von Weltershausen Original Music Can, Jürgen Knieper, Axel Linstädt. Directed by Wim Wenders

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

This morning I 'fessed up to never having seen David Lynch's Lost Highway. Now I get to say that until now I've never seen Wim Wenders'...

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a madly prolific filmmaker, completing some 40 features, plus three short films, plus more than one television series, plus two dozen plays and more and more, all in less than 15 years. Fassbinder was also an actor of brute strength and surprising agility. His final role came in Kamikaze '89 in 1982, which has undergone a 4K restoration that will debut in New York early in June. Before that happens, Film Movement has launched a Kickstarter campaign, which is intended to help with a planned re-release, Blu-ray production, and possibly the creation of a new 35mm print of the film. Here's an official statement on what is now underway: Film Movement, the New York-based distributor of independent, arthouse and foreign films,...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

If the age old cliche is true, then true genius will not earn the proper respect and admiration until years after they have passed. Need an example? Subject number one: Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

While he’s garnered high praise before and after his deeply sad passing at the age of 37, the last few years, marked by numerous box sets of his work and various Blu-ray releases of his Grade-a masterpieces, have seen Fassbinder become a relative household name in arthouse and world cinema circles. And now he’s the subject of not one, but two documentaries, one of which debuts this weekend in New York for an exclusive one week engagement at The Metrograph.

With The Fassbinder Story waiting in the wings (it just played this year’s Kino! Festival in NY), director Christian Braad Thomsen attempts to discuss Fassbinder’s life in his own way with the superlative biographical...

It’s no real secret that we’re reaching a tipping point with home video. Streaming is proving a better and better option for the casual consumer every day, and even the cinephile dollar, which has rather successfully driven home video decisions for the past couple of years, has such services as Hulu, Fandor, Mubi, and – soon – FilmStruck vying for their attention. Physical distributors have subsequently doubled down on their most successful and acclaimed models. Criterion is going big on new-to-disc, big international titles with new restorations (Brighter Summer Day, Paris Belongs to Us, A Touch of Zen) and lavish new editions of American classics (The New World, Dr. Strangelove). Kino is investing in silent classics (Fantomas, The Phantom of the Opera, Diary of a Lost Girl) while diversifying to include more American studio titles. Masters of Cinema is going into deep specialty stuff with an Early Murnau box and Edvard Munch.

When observing its material from something of a remove, it could easily be argued that Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands is a bit drier than its amazing subject deserves. While I don’t wish to spend too much time in a review of someone else’s documentary extolling the virtues of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s massive, emotionally bruising filmography, it’s worth noting the division between those films, many of which are seen herein via clip form, and Christian Braad Thomsen’s document, the film at hand. Being that this is subtitled as his “Personal Recollections,” it’s only natural for the picture to favor his and others’ direct experiences with Fassbinder over anything else; even the most prominent interview with the eponymous figure is Thomsen’s own work. We get this in the “info-dump” style, the sort of documentary filmmaking one might be able to immediately picture: talking-head...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.NEWSDirector Guy Hamilton, Sean Connery, and Honor Blackman on the set of Goldfinger.We're still stunned from the sudden death of music legend Prince, at a time when Bowie is still on our minds and in our hearts.Last week we also lost director Guy Hamilton, an action director who began as an Ad for Carol Reed (on The Fallen Idol and The Third Man, among others), and best known for leading several James Bond entries, starting with Goldfinger in 1964.The Tribeca Film Festival wrapped in New York over the weekend, and the winners have been announced, including best international feature to Junction 48 and best documentary feature to Do Not Resist.There is no other cinematic project we're more looking forward to than 2017's continuation of David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks.

★★★★☆ Producing more work in his short fifteen-year career than most directors do in a lifetime, German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder is emblematic of the New German Cinema movement, and remains a powerful voice of avant-garde European cinema. In the first of a new collection, Arrow Video bring us ten of Fassbinder's most interesting pictures, starting with two films made in 1971 - The Merchant of Four Seasons and Beware of a Holy Whore.

Each weekend we highlight the best repertory programming that New York City has to offer, and it’s about to get even better. Opening on February 19th at 7 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side is Metrograph, the city’s newest indie movie theater. Sporting two screens, they’ve announced their first slate, which includes retrospectives for Fassbinder, Wiseman, Eustache, and more, special programs such as an ode to the moviegoing experience, and new independent features that we’ve admired on the festival circuit (including Afternoon, Office 3D, and Measure of a Man).

Artistic and Programming Director Jacob Perlin says in a press release, “Jean Eustache in a Rocky t-shirt. This is the image we had in mind while making this first calendar. Great cinema is there, wherever you can find it. The dismissed film now recognized as a classic, the forgotten box-office hit newly resurrected, the high and the low,...

Of the Big Three new wavers of German cinema—Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders-- who “came of age” as it were in the ‘70s, when I was in college and my own stake in the movies was budding into something more learned and substantial than what it was when I first discovered my love for them, Herzog has emerged as the director who most speaks to me now as an adult. I think that’s true at least in part because when his movies do speak to me it never feels like a one-sided conversation. I feel like I’m in there engaging in a push-pull with Herzog’s ability to seduce me (disarm me?) with his simplicity of approach, an ability which rarely seems satisfied to consider subjects from the less-perverse of two perspectives, and his tendency to rhapsodize and harangue and sidestep visual motifs...

"She's a camp event and a celebrity and that's all and the last thing anybody needs is to make a giant bomb with her that any fool could see coming." —Scott Rudin, lover of many women. Akhmatova has a great poem, one of her Northern Elegies, which starts like this: I, like a river,Have been turned aside by this harsh age.I am a substitute. My life has flowedInto another channelAnd I do not recognize my shores. The poet uses the power of imagination to do a mild perversion of Proust’s Madeleine. Or not Proust, a realization of Heisenberg. To conjure an entire dead-cat life, another conditional mood persona, the ahistoric Akhmatova, who would have been. If this By the Sea, with all its creaky dollhouse dust, had been made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder or by Todd Haynes I bet you all $10 everybody (and Scott Rudin in particular) would be creaming their jeans.

Festival will feature 10 films from the German cinematographer in February.

The 66th Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 11-21) is to award an Honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement to German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, to whom the festival is also dedicating this year’s Homage.

Ballhaus is perhaps best known for his collaboration with director Martin Scorsese on films including Goodfellas, The Color of Money, The Age of Innocence and Gangs Of New York.

Before spending 25 years working primarily in the Us, Ballhaus established his reputation in Germany where he worked with, among others, auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The award will be bestowed on Feb 18, accompanied by a screening of Gangs Of New York, which was shown out of competition at the 2003 Berlinale.

The previous evening, there will be an in conversation event titled Michael Ballhaus Meets Jim Rakete.

Ballhaus was president of the Berlinale’s International Jury in 1990 and was awarded the Berlinale Camera for his unique...

At long last, a worthy digital transfer has been granted the rather grim and horrific Tenderness of the Wolves, an obscure title from the extensive universe of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, here serving as producer. The fourth title assembled under Fassbinder’s production company Tango-Film, Ulli Lommel takes on directorial duty for what stands as the his most notable title. But Lommel’s contributions take a back seat to leading star and screenwriter Kurt Raab. Both members of Fassbinder’s extensive cinematic troupe, having starred in 1969’s Love is Colder Than Death, along with several future affiliations, the film’s production history proves to have its own potent elements dictating the final memorable outcome.

Padded out with a ton of notable Fassbinder faces, it’s a wonder this title isn’t more well-known, even as a cult favorite. But its explicit homosexual content, derided as harmful and negative at the time,...

The catalyst behind Ulli Lommel's perverse horror masterpiece might be writer-actor-art director Kurt Raab. He's almost too convincing as Fritz Haarmann, an infamous real-life serial killer of young men who masks his abominable activities behind a snitch relationship with the police. He's an obscene cross between Peter Lorre's child-murderer and the ghoul Nosferatu. Tenderness of the Wolves Region B Blu-ray + Pal DVD Arrow Video (UK) 1973 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 80 min. / Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe / Street Date November 2, 2015 / £12.99 Starring Kurt Raab, Jeff Roden, Margit Carstensen, Ingrid Caven, Wolfgang Schenck, Brigitte Mira, Rainer Hauer, Barbara Bertram, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Cinematography Jürgen Jürges Production Design Kurt Raab Makeup Elfie Kruse Editing Thea Eymèsz Original Music Peter Raben Written by Kurt Raab Produced by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Fengler Directed by Ulli Lommel

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Movie horrors can't compete with real life any more, in an overcrowded, often hostile world that seems to encourage terrible crimes.

“Fassbinder died, so God gave us Ulrich Seidl,” wrote John Waters in Artforum in 2012. You can find obvious parallels between the directors; both are German-speaking iconoclasts (Seidl is Austrian; Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982, was from Bavaria), whose precisely arranged and shot films cloak worlds of odd and over-the-top individuals with a patina of intense, self-conscious color, supplemented with frequently incongruous, unanticipated music. Before it became de rigueur, they explored in depth the intersection of the personal and the political in unique, ideologically loaded and often grotesque narratives. It’s not by chance that their bodies of work […]...

“Fassbinder died, so God gave us Ulrich Seidl,” wrote John Waters in Artforum in 2012. You can find obvious parallels between the directors; both are German-speaking iconoclasts (Seidl is Austrian; Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982, was from Bavaria), whose precisely arranged and shot films cloak worlds of odd and over-the-top individuals with a patina of intense, self-conscious color, supplemented with frequently incongruous, unanticipated music. Before it became de rigueur, they explored in depth the intersection of the personal and the political in unique, ideologically loaded and often grotesque narratives. It’s not by chance that their bodies of work […]...

Each week, the fine folks at Fandor add a number of films to their Criterion Picks area, which will then be available to subscribers for the following twelve days. This week, the Criterion Picks focus on eight films from Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Fall in love with a giant of New German Cinema with a selection of curated highlights from the prolific yet truncated career of iconoclast director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Don’t have a Fandor subscription? They offer a free trial membership.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 All That Heaven Allows. A lonely widow meets a much younger Arab worker in a bar during a rainstorm. They fall in love, to their own surprise, and to the outright shock of their families, colleagues, and drinking buddies. In Ali: Fear Eats The Soul,...

UK premieres include Palio, The Company You Keep and Infinitely Polar Bear.Scroll down for full programme

The 35th Cambridge Film Festival (Sept 3-13) has revealed its full line-up for this year, including titles from over 30 different countries.

Star*Men, a documentary from debut director Alison E. Rose will open the festival. The film follows four UK astronomers, Donald Lynden-Bell Frs and Roger Griffin of the University of Cambridge, and Wal Sargent Frs and Neville Woolf of Manchester University, on a road trip to the United States.

The festival’s closing night gala will be the UK premiere of Palio, Cosima Spender’s documentary about the world’s oldest horse race, which debuted at Tribeca in April before playing at Karlovy Vary in July.

The main programme will feature the UK premiere of Robert Redford’s political thriller The Company You Keep, which he directrs and stars in. The festival will also screen the Redford-starring A Walk In The Woods, from...

On the fourth anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s death, I was watching the opening night screening of Amy at the New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, another documentary about a legendary musician who died at the age of twenty-seven, was also slated in the New Horizons program. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the controversial German filmmaker who made over 40 films before his death at thirty-seven years old, was the subject of Fassbinder, a documentary also screening in Wroclaw. The Actress, a documentary about the Polish movie star Elżbieta Czyżewska, who fled from communist Warsaw to New […]...

On the fourth anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s death, I was watching the opening night screening of Amy at the New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, another documentary about a legendary musician who died at the age of twenty-seven, was also slated in the New Horizons program. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the controversial German filmmaker who made over 40 films before his death at thirty-seven years old, was the subject of Fassbinder, a documentary also screening in Wroclaw. The Actress, a documentary about the Polish movie star Elżbieta Czyżewska, who fled from communist Warsaw to New […]...

This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David and Trevor conclude their two-part discussion of Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder.

About the films:

From the very beginning of his incandescent career, the New German Cinema enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder refused to play by the rules. His politically charged, experimental first films, made at an astonishingly rapid rate between 1969 and 1970, were influenced by the work of the Antiteater, an avant-garde stage troupe that he had helped found in Munich. Collected here are five of those fascinating and confrontational works. Whether a self- conscious meditation on American crime movies, a scathing indictment of xenophobia in contemporary Germany, or an off-the-wall look at the dysfunctional relationships on film sets, each is a startling...

This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David and Trevor discuss Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder.

About the films:

From the very beginning of his incandescent career, the New German Cinema enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder refused to play by the rules. His politically charged, experimental first films, made at an astonishingly rapid rate between 1969 and 1970, were influenced by the work of the Antiteater, an avant-garde stage troupe that he had helped found in Munich. Collected here are five of those fascinating and confrontational works. Whether a self- conscious meditation on American crime movies, a scathing indictment of xenophobia in contemporary Germany, or an off-the-wall look at the dysfunctional relationships on film sets, each is a startling glimpse into the mind...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.The New York Film Festival has revealed that Robert Zemeckis's much-anticipated 3D quasi-heist film The Walk will open the 2015 event. The newly released full trailer can be watched above.Famed writer Jean Gruault has died at the age of 90. Gruault had written scripts for François Truffaut (Jules and Jim), Jacques Rivette (The Nun), Alain Resnais (Mon oncle d'Amérique), and others, including writing the novel on which Valérie Donzelli's Cannes competitor this year, Marguerite & Julien, was based.We're crossing our fingers that Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight will make 50+ cinemas in the U.S. equipped to project 70mm.This week is a trailer bonanza, including Mistress America, the new Noah Baumbach collaboration with actress Greta Gerwig after Frances Ha.This Long Century has published several new pieces, including...

The Merchant of Four Seasons

Written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Germany, 1971

Rainer Werner Fassbinder had a true talent for probing insights into the deep despair and disenchantment of the human condition. His characters were doomed people, ones fellow German New Waver Wim Wenders speaks of as helpless and hopeless. Such descriptions perfectly suit those in Fassbinder’s 1971 film, The Merchant of Four Seasons, which is out now on a new Criterion Collection Blu-ray. Here, Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmüller) has just returned from duty with the French Foreign Legion. Home in Munich after being gone about a year, he is first greeted with a less than enthusiastic reception from his mother (Gusti Kreissl). As he tells of friends lost in the fighting, she counters with, “The best are left behind while people like you come home.” This is just the tip of the iceberg for what Wenders says is...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.Above: Rainer Werner Fassbinder would have turned 70 this week. Can you imagine how many films unfilmed he would have made between 1982, when he died, and now? At his Movie Poster of the Day Tumblr, Adrian Curry has found a fantastic poster for Fassbinder's 1981 film, Lola.fxguide has a terrific exploration of the computer effects used in George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road.Above: Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard. From our Tumblr.New York's essential BAMcinamFest, running June 17 - 28, has announced its 2015 lineup, which features such Notebook favorites as Queen of Earth, Stinking Heaven, and Counting, as well as several premieres including a new short film by our friend and contributor C. Mason Wells.Film Comment's Nicholas Rapold has interviewed with Apichatpong Weerasethakul about Cemetery of Splendour, the best film in Cannes this year.

“We’re all pigs,” remarks a character late in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1971 classic The Merchant of Four Seasons, on observation one could apply to most of the desperate and disparate characters littered throughout the German New Wave master’s oeuvre. In this instance, the comment is made by the protagonist’s familial successor. Fassbinder’s flaccid fruit vendor shrinks into the shadows of his own periphery, a failed patriarch reduced to the general fate of mediocre men in times of societal resurgence, (here specifically in the 1950s, the post-war period of the German economic miracle) marked for replacement by a trusted friend, stepping in to pinch-hit. Regarded as one of Fassbinder’s best early titles, it is one of his most accessible Sirkian inspired melodramas earning notable critical applause during an impressively fruitful period, imbued with the director’s favorite themes concerning dwindling personas of those foolish enough to...

A year before his tragic death in 1982, German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder — the cinema outlaw poet whose filmography included over 40 films and the epic TV mini-series "World on a Wire" and "Berlin Alexanderplatz" — put together a list of his top 10 favorite films. How did they influence him? Fassbinder's very favorite was Visconti's "The Damned," a visually sumptuous panorama of societal collapse and decay in Third Reich Germany and no doubt an influence on the German auteur's own "Brd Trilogy," in particular the bawdy, bordello-set "Lola." Watch: Watch: Rw Fassbinder's Early Godard-Inspired Short "A Little Chaos" In his early days, Fassbinder wore his influences like a beret, cribbing the style of early Godard films to make coolly composed black-and-white tales of chic Europeans and their nihilism. But then he found a style all his own: rich, character-driven psychodramas, meta-movie exercises and romantic...

Today being the actual 70th anniversary of the birth of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, I've updated the "Fassbinder @ 70" entry—and today, I thought I'd drop a note or two on Fassbinder Now, the exhibition currently on view in Berlin through August 23. And, as background to a few words on one of the installations, Runa Islam's Garden, I've translated a snippet from a conversation between Tom Tykwer and Michael Ballhaus about the legendary first 360-degree tracking shot that the cinematographer and Fassbinder set up for Martha (1974). » - David Hudson...

Today being the actual 70th anniversary of the birth of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, I've updated the "Fassbinder @ 70" entry—and today, I thought I'd drop a note or two on Fassbinder Now, the exhibition currently on view in Berlin through August 23. And, as background to a few words on one of the installations, Runa Islam's Garden, I've translated a snippet from a conversation between Tom Tykwer and Michael Ballhaus about the legendary first 360-degree tracking shot that the cinematographer and Fassbinder set up for Martha (1974). » - David Hudson...

Nearly every mention of Rainer Werner Fassbinder is going to be followed by numbers: 44 movies in 16 years. And throughout this month in Germany: 70. Events marking the anniversary of the birth, on May 31, 1945, of the filmmaker regarded by many in the country during his lifetime as a Bürgerschreck—an enfant terrible at best, if not an outright menace to society—begin today, and some will run throughout the summer. Among the many screenings is Annekatrin Hendel's new documentary, Fassbinder and theatrical productions include adaptations of Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and The Marriage of Maria Braun. » - David Hudson...

Nearly every mention of Rainer Werner Fassbinder is going to be followed by numbers: 44 movies in 16 years. And throughout this month in Germany: 70. Events marking the anniversary of the birth, on May 31, 1945, of the filmmaker regarded by many in the country during his lifetime as a Bürgerschreck—an enfant terrible at best, if not an outright menace to society—begin today, and some will run throughout the summer. Among the many screenings is Annekatrin Hendel's new documentary, Fassbinder and theatrical productions include adaptations of Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and The Marriage of Maria Braun. » - David Hudson...

German actor best known for his roles in the films of Fassbinder

Filmgoers familiar with the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder will certainly know Günther Kaufmann, who has died of a heart attack aged 64. Kaufmann had parts great and small in more than a dozen of the prolific German director's movies. He was what the Germans call a "Besatzungskind", one of the many children born between 1945 and 1949 as a result of relationships between German women and American soldiers. Kaufmann's black GI father, whom he never knew, returned to the Us before he was born in Munich. According to Fassbinder: "Günther thinks Bavarian, feels Bavarian and speaks Bavarian. And that's why he gets a shock every morning when he looks in the mirror." Kaufmann, whom Fassbinder always called "my Bavarian negro", played an important role in his life.

They first met in the autumn of 1969 on the set of Volker Schlöndorff...