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Explore where to stream the best films of 2023.

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.

Drylongso (Cauleen Smith)

Writer-director Cauleen Smith made Drylongso when she was in college, 25 years ago, premiering at Sundance in 1998. She has gone on to create dozens of short films, art installations, and more experimental work, focused on similar themes of feminism, racial violence, and Black communities. The low-key hangout movie should have been a stepping stone for Smith, but, as with many other works by Black female filmmaking of the last half-century, it fell out of circulation. – Michael F. (full interview)

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

Fingernails (Christos Nikou)

Is love quantifiable? No, but that doesn’t stop Greek filmmaker Christos Nikou from exploring that question over two dull, excruciating hours in Fingernails,...

Among the myriad reasons we could call the Criterion Channel the single greatest streaming service is its leveling of cinematic snobbery. Where a new World Cinema Project restoration plays, so too does Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight. I think about this looking at November’s lineup and being happiest about two new additions: a nine-film Robert Bresson retro including L’argent and The Devil, Probably; and a one-film Hype Williams retro including Belly and only Belly, but bringing as a bonus the direct-to-video Belly 2: Millionaire Boyz Club. Until recently such curation seemed impossible.

November will also feature a 20-film noir series boasting the obvious and the not. Maybe the single tightest collection is “Women of the West,” with Johnny Guitar and The Beguiled and Rancho Notorious and The Furies only half of it. Lynch/Oz, Irradiated, and My Two Voices make streaming premieres; Drylongso gets a Criterion Edition; and joining...

Italian actor remembered for her roles in Day for Night, The Wandering Jew and The House on Telegraph Hill

When Ingrid Bergman received her Oscar as best supporting actress for Murder on the Orient Express (1974), she concluded her acceptance speech by saying: “Please forgive me, Valentina. I didn’t mean to.” She was referring to the vibrant Italian actor Valentina Cortese, who was nominated alongside her for her role in François Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine.

In that film, Cortese, who has died aged 96, played Severine, an ageing star who quaffs champagne while working, cannot find the right door to enter or exit, and blames her failure to remember her lines on the makeup girl. Cortese was already an established actor with the best part of her career behind her at the time of Truffaut’s inspirational casting. “A real character, extremely feminine and very funny,” he remarked of her at the time.

Italian actress Valentina Cortese, Oscar-nominated for her performance in François Truffaut’s 1973 drama Day For Night, has died aged 96, according to Italian news service Ansa.

The prolific actress, whose career spanned more than 50 years, started out in Italian films of the early 1940s, leading to internationally acclaimed roles in Riccardo Freda’s 1948 Italian movie Les Misérables and the 1949 British film The Glass Mountain (1949), which led to a number of roles in American features.

Cortese starred in movies including second world war thriller Malaya with Spencer Tracy and James Stewart, Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway with Richard Conte, and Joseph L Makiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa with Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner.

In Europe she later starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le Amiche, Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen and Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon.

In 1975, Cortese received a best supporting actress Oscar nomination for her role...

Valentina Cortese, an Italian actress who held the extremely rare distinction of having been nominated for best supporting actress for her work in a foreign film, Francois Truffaut’s 1973 classic “Day for Night,” has died, according to Italian news agency Ansa. She was 96.

In Truffaut’s “Day for Night,” considered by many to be the best movie about making movies ever made, Cortese played, in the words of Roger Ebert, “the alcoholic diva past her prime.” The New York Times said: “The performances are superb. Miss Cortese and Miss Bisset are not only both hugely funny but also hugely affecting, in moments that creep up on you without warning.”

For a two-part, Carlo Ponti-produced 1948 film adaptation of “Les Miserables,” Cortese caused a sensation by playing both female leads, Fantine and Cosette. (The film was otherwise an adequate treatment of the Victor Hugo novel.)

“With Valentina Cortese’s passing, the...

Michelangelo Antonioni's pre-international breakthrough drama is as good as anything he's done, a flawlessly acted and directed story of complex relationships -- that include his 'career' themes before the existential funk set in. It's one of the best-blocked dramatic films ever... the direction is masterful. Le amiche Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 817 1955 / B&W / 1:37 flat full frame / 106 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date June 7, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Eleonora Rossi Drago, Gabriele Ferzetti, Franco Fabrizi, Valentina Cortese, Madeleine Fischer, Yvonne Furneaux, Anna Maria Pancani, Luciano Volpato, Maria Gambarelli, Ettore Manni. Cinematography Gianni De Venanzo Film Editor Eraldo Da Roma Original Music Giovanni Fusco Written by Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alba de Cespedes from a book by Cesare Pavese Produced by Giovanni Addessi Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

It's time to stop being so intimidated by Michelangelo Antonioni. His epics of existential alienation La notte, L'eclisse and...

The icon-establishing performances Marilyn Monroe gave in Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) are ones for the ages, touchstone works that endure because of the undeniable comic energy and desperation that sparked them from within even as the ravenous public became ever more enraptured by the surface of Monroe’s seductive image of beauty and glamour. Several generations now probably know her only from these films, or perhaps 1955’s The Seven-Year Itch, a more famous probably for the skirt-swirling pose it generated than anything in the movie itself, one of director Wilder’s sourest pictures, or her final completed film, The Misfits (1961), directed by John Huston, written by Arthur Miller and costarring Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift.

But in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952) she delivers a powerful dramatic performance as Nell, a psychologically devastated, delusional, perhaps psychotic young woman apparently on...

Return From the Ashes: Petzold’s Compelling Resurrection of WWII Aftermath

At the head of the cinematic movement referred to as the Berlin School of filmmaking is auteur Christian Petzold, an internationally renowned artist whose works have met with increasing critical success and notable visibility. Usually utilizing the talents of his frequent collaborator, German beauty Nina Hoss, the duo has returned with Phoenix, their follow-up to the celebrated 2012 title, Barbara, where it snagged a Best Actress award at the Berlin Film Festival.

While that film examined a predicament in early 80’s East Berlin, Petzold reaches farther back into the troubled tumultuousness of Germany history with his latest feature, set shortly after the end of WWII. The surviving members of Germany’s populace are forced to contend with restructuring via the help of outside military sources, as well as dealing with the returning survivors of the concentration camps. Like most of Petzold’s films,...

Adopting another's identity is seen as a melodramatic trick of the movies, like the evil twin in soap operas – but aren't we all imposture experts?

In The Big Picture, Romain Duris plays a prosperous Parisian lawyer who accidentally kills his wife's lover. And then, because he has always yearned to be an artist, he swaps identities with the dead man and starts a new life as a boho photographer. Taking the place of a dead person (as opposed to posing as a dead person, like Shaun of the Dead and friends) is a recurring motif of the noirish thriller, most memorably in Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley, filmed by both Réné Clément (as Plein Soleil, starring Alain Delon at the peak of his male pulchritude) and Anthony Minghella.

Ripley murders the man whose identity he appropriates, but impersonators more often drift passively into imposture because circumstances enable or even demand it.