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The Criterion Channel is closing the year out with a bang––they’ve announced their December lineup. Among the highlights are retrospectives on Yasujiro Ozu (featuring nearly 40 films!), Ousmane Sembène, Alfred Hitchcock (along with Kent Jones’ Hitchcock/Truffaut), and Parker Posey. Well-timed for the season is a holiday noir series that includes They Live By Night, Blast of Silence, Lady in the Lake, and more.

Other highlights are the recent restoration of Abel Gance’s La roue, an MGM Musicals series with introduction by Michael Koresky, Helena Wittmann’s riveting second feature Human Flowers of Flesh, the recent Sundance highlight The Mountains Are a Dream That Call To Me, the new restoration of The Cassandra Cat, Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster, and more.

See the lineup below and learn more here.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Terry Gilliam, 1988

An American in Paris, Vincente Minnelli,...

Samuel L. Jackson, Gabrielle Union and more have paid tribute to “Shaft” icon Richard Roundtree, who died Tuesday afternoon after a short battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 81.

Jackson, who first portrayed detective John Shaft’s (Roundtree) nephew in the 2000 sequel to Gordon Parks’ 1971 action thriller “Shaft,” posted a photo of himself and Roundtree on Instagram from the 2019 action thriller, also titled “Shaft.”

“Richard Roundtree, The Prototype, The Best To Ever Do It!! Shaft, as we know it is & will always be His Creation!!,” Jackson wrote in the caption. “His passing leaves a deep hole not only in my heart, but I’m sure a lotta y’all’s, too.”

“Love you Brother, I see you walking down the Middle of Main Street in Heaven & Issac’s Conducting your song coat blowin’ in wind!! Angels whispering, ‘That Cat Shaft Is A Bad Mutha, Shutcho Mouth!! But I’m Talkin’ Bout Shaft!

Spooky season has arrived, and Alamo Drafthouse is celebrating Halloween in a big way this year. First up, their “Spread Fear” series embraces horror all month long, delivering a witches brew made up of some of the best, bloodiest, downright maniacal horror films out there.

“Our Spread Fear series embraces all the chilling fun of the holiday season with a full slate of some of the greatest horror movies ever put to film,” Alamo Drafthouse previews. “We’re talking The Thing, Ghostbusters (1984), The Lost Boys Movie Party, The Mummy + The Wolf Man Double Feature, a Champagne Cinema screening of The Craft, and so much more.

“But Halloween isn’t all about killers and tortured monsters, it’s also about the candy. The whole family can get in on the spooky fun with Trick or Treat Cinema, a series dedicated to maximum value and maximum fun with discount tickets and candy for everyone.

Last week we learned, via the National Film Archive (Czech Republic) that Janus Films (and the Criterion Collection) had just signed a new deal with plans to bring 30 classic Czech films to the Us.

From the announcement:

The National Film Archive has concluded an important contract with distribution company Janus Films which opens the road to expending knowledge of Czech classic films in all of North America.

Among the more than 30 Czech classic films available to American audiences for screening in cinemas and on DVD in the Us and Canada are titles such as The Cremator, Marketa Lazarová, All My Good Countrymen, Three Nuts for Cinderella. It’s made possible thanks to a new contract signed by National Film Archive director Michal Bregant and distribution company Janus Films.

Michal Bregant offered a comment: “We have signed the contract symbolically this week in Bologna at the festival Il cinema ritrovato, which...

Above: 1965 Czech poster for Three Fables of Love (Blasetti, Bromberger, Clair, Berlanga, Italy/Spain, 1962). Designer: Karel Teissig.Two events provoked this article. First of all, last week I saw the wonderful 1963 Czech fable The Cassandra Cat (a.k.a. When the Cat Comes) at New York’s newest cinephile hotspot, the Metrograph. In this charming New Wave satire a cat wearing dark glasses is brought into a small town by a circus troupe and, when his glasses are removed, the townspeople are revealed in their true colors: namely neon shades of purple, yellow and pink, each representing their vices or virtues. The highlight of the film for me, aside from a psychedelic freak-out dance party in the middle of the film, comes when all the children of the town march through the street bearing large drawings of cats. Chris Marker would have loved this film.The second event was the...