Filmstruck / Criterion Channel

The film streaming service from TCM & Criterion Collection goes live in 13 days — October 19th.
$6.99/month for the basic service, $10.99/month (or $99/year) for Filmstruck + Criterion Channel

Who's in?

looks good that they have the commentaries, extras etc of Criterion discs, or at least some of that kind of content. i hope this won't mean the end of the Criterion blu rays. i'm expecting 'that market' will always want the 36 page books and fancy packaging and such. i know i will.

http://www.filmstruck.com/

I'm in.

i wonder why the TCM lot and the Criterion gang decided to get into bed together. i mean Criterion doesn't seem like an obvious match for Ted 'Colourization' Turner.

Turner hasn't been involved in years...? TCM is a pretty good channel. Have they ever shown a colorized film?

Cons: US only, no Roku support at launch, extreme vagueness (how many films? "HUNDREDS of films!")

But I'll sign up, at least for a few months.

I'll wait to start until Criterion joins up in November. I'll drop the $99 for their catalog alone.

Criterion won't be available from day 1? I hadn't heard that part.

Yet no one posts on my Fandor thread

November 11th for Criterion. They have to wait for the Hulu deal to expire.

Not bad, if you do the $99 once-a-year payment, it's about $20 cheaper than a year of Netflix. Is there any way to browse the TCM catalog at the moment?

On their FB page they said Criterion will be available at launch.

I want to sign up but my two devices (Nvidia Shield TV and XB1) aren't supported.

I went by this press release that says the 1th of November.

https://thefilmstage.com/news/filmstruck-and-the-criterion-channel-reveal-subscription-pricing-plans/

Been reading a lot of information on the website and elsewhere, but haven't seen anything that says the TCM movies will also be part of the package. I have a nagging feeling that they're not. Also wonder if the Criterion movies will be available in 1080, instead of the 720 now on Hulu.

I don't think everything on nightly at TCM will be on there but a selection of TCM-sequel films.

I'm going to guess it will be like Mubi with a larger rotating library plus Criterion.

TCM-esque

yeah, TCM's tweet that filmstruck "will focus on indie, foreign & cult titles, not Old Hollywood. Some limited titles, not many" considerably dampened my enthusiasm.

https://twitter.com/tcm/status/777661149911347200

my guess is milo z otm re: criterion plus larger mubi. Which is cool, but not the turner library plus janus library nearly nonstop excellence that i had prematurely imagined

I have a Hulu subscription and honestly never watched a single Criterion title. The ones I want, I just buy.

I was excited when I thought this was gonna be criterion + old Hollywood tcm stuff. The latter element was critical for me. If it's criterion + buffet of other stuff then no.

Yeah, that's a bummer. I figured $99 was a no brainer but if it's Criterion plus some random rotating films I don't know.

basically i would pay... let's see... $15 a month for some reasonable fascimile of access to TCM's programming without having to have fucking cable tv

aw man. I too was pretty stoked for the TCM+Criterion version of this.

This weird in-between time where the biggest events still happen on old-fashioned cable TV, the "prestige" TEH DISCOURSE TV shows are on Netflix, film is either exploded across multiple competing streaming services or iTunes rental downloads that disappear after 24 hours or totally unavailable, video stores are rare — is totally excruciating.

whiney otm, i feel a deep nostalgia for, like, 2008-2010, when a full decade of DVD production had led to lot of foreign/classic/arthouse stuff to be available, and Netflix was still in the business of providing just about any DVD that got produced.

Like, the fact that we let this happen is ridiculous: http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2014/09/12/netflix_streaming_dvds/

maybe i just wasn't reading the early filmstruck announcements carefully, but it seems like everyone i know was expecting it to have a major focus on classic hollywood, given tcm's involvement. My guess is that getting streaming rights to that old hollywood stuff is probably just insanely complicated and, from a business perspective, not worth the investment of time and resources. Still disappointing though.

I've never watched any Criterions on Hulu but that's because their interface is such a disaster - you don't know what's streaming in HD, there's no easy way to sort the entire Criterion list, etc. Higher hopes for this, though I'm a lot less inclined toward a burning need to watch Truffaut than when I was 23.

Their interface/searching/tagging/credits is all pretty awful in comparison to Netflix and even Amazon Prime. That said, damn I'm gonna have to rush out some screenings before they leave. Better get Lady Snowblood queued up.

The FAQ has changed to specify that only 4th-gen Apple TV will support this, so me and my 3rd-gen box are out of luck. I'll have to load a film on my iMac and push it to the tv with Airplay.

With airplay/casting, does it make a difference if you're casting from a phone vs. a computer?

(I think my Apple TV is second generation...)

I honestly don't know. That time David Lynch cussed traumatized me so bad I've never tried watching film or video on my phone.

sad trombone

Hello film fans:

We want to share some news that the launch of FilmStruck is delayed until November as we work to complete a seamless and easy registration process for subscribers.

Just like the final stages of completing a film, this additional time will allow us to put the finishing touches on FilmStruck in order to bring you a premium service with beautifully curated content and the largest streaming library of world-renowned arthouse, indie, cult and foreign films. Rest assured, we're working hard to bring you the high-quality streaming movie service you've been waiting for.

Thank you for both your patience and your enthusiastic interest in FilmStruck.

The FilmStruck Team

At this point they should wait until the Hulu contract for the Criterions expires.

Yep. I wasn't planning on starting any free trial until everything was available.

Launched.
Looks like the Criterions are up with an 11-day overlap with Hulu. Seeing a lot of fussing on the Facebook page about errors while setting up payment.

Anyone start using this yet? Any thoughts (apart from the still unavailable (?) Criterions?

I'm in, just getting the apps installed now. I need a tivo app! Apple and Amazon will do for now.

Sound like it's worth waiting a few weeks for them to get all the bugs worked out

Not available on Roku til Jan so nope for a while. Also copy on their site suggested that virtually all Criterions wd be available but several that I've searched for are not (incl All That Jazz, ugh)

They have someone responding to comments on Facebook, putting on the shiny happy face but being really vague with specific questions.

Some Guy Named Dave: Your Criterion selection seems to be quite limited. Are you ever going to offer the same number of Criterion titles as Hulu - over 900?

FilmStruck: Hi Dave, on the #CriterionChannel side you will find the largest selection of Criterion releases available to stream

Me: That doesn't really answer the question that was asked...

FilmStruck: #CriterionChannel has the largest Criterion selection available streaming, more than was ever available elsewhere.

Me: Ozu on Hulu: 30 features, 2 shorts and a trailer
Ozu on Filmstruck: looks like 18 features

Filmstruck: (crickets)

Huh, why would it have less than Hulu does? That doesn't make any sense to me. I did notice through a cursory search that they had at least two titles not on Hulu (Godard's Every Man for Himself and Yang's A Brighter Summer Day), so I was hopeful that maybe it had more than Hulu.

It doesn't have all the Oshima titles that are currently on Hulu either

I'm hoping they're still loading up the buffet table. They have quite a few things that aren't on Hulu -- Blood Simple, that JFK documentary stuff. They got The Killing of a Chinese Bookie back, which disappeared from Hulu a year or more ago.

I'm hopeful too, though the way filmstruck has been marketed and rolled out has dampened my expectations all around

Even Criterion doesn't have the rights to all the Criterions anymore

yeah, otm, and i'm sure there are a number of criterions that got dvd release, but where they never had streaming rights. the more i search around on filmstruck the more i think that WilliamC is probably right that they're still adding movies to the service.

hm. no amazon app even!

TBF, this is the day where they're going nuts with the press.

They managed to go with all the devices that I don't own. Not sure it's worth picking up a new AppleTV just for this.

seems lame that it's not on xbone/ps4; that's what a very significant chunk of the population use to stream stuff, no?

Oh wait, I do have an Amazon Fire TV in my office, guess I can watch Kurosawa while filling out payroll forms and stuff.

filling empty space with the greatest cinema ever made is kinda why i'm willing to give up a c-note for even the dream of that actually happening.

They managed to go with all the devices that I don't own. Not sure it's worth picking up a new AppleTV just for this.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Wednesday, November 2, 2016 1:41 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A Chromecast is $35

for me, it's about having a tv with limited HD inputs... one for the ps4, one for the tivo and switching stuff out means a painful boot up period and extra hassle so i find i just don't do it

It's not available for the Chromecast, according to them That means I can screen mirror if I got one but have to leave my laptop up and running the entire time.

Screen mirroring quality is pretty meh, IME, but it's been a while since I used a Chromecast.

It's available for Chromecast in December, you won't die if you have to wait 30 days before you can see Andrei Rublev

It will be available for XBox One and Roku in six months, pretty sure I could find plenty to watch on Netflix and Amazon Video until then. We're talking about now, though.

It's available for Chromecast in December, you won't die if you have to wait 30 days before you can see Andrei Rublev

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Wednesday, November 2, 2016 11:11 AM (fifty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also as a public service announcement the criterion print of andrei rublev is shitty and you can watch a much better transfer on youtube right now

They said PS4 "first half" of the coming year, so most likely I'd wait a while. No Chromecast/Roku support at launch seems pretty weak, though.

Roku support was slated for January 2017 acc to some infographic I saw on their website but now cannot find (because their website seems to be three completely different websites cobbled together and filled with contradicting info).

I just want to stream All That Jazz why is this so damn hard

The latest from their Facebook flack to commenters is "early 2017" for Roku.

I didn't do an exact count, but it looks like roughly 900 films on the Criterion side. Since there are a lot that haven't migrated over from Hulu (yet), that means there are a lot of additions. Browsing around just a little bit I saw Blood Simple, the other 2 films in Wim Wenders' Road Trilogy to go with Alice in the Cities, some Harold Lloyd that hadn't been on Hulu, some New Wave.

*British New Wave

When is this up for AppleTV?

December, allegedly. (4th-gen only, nothing earlier)

Signed up last night; Hulu account expires tomorrow. Started with No Home Movie and Ornette: Made in America.

cool, any glitches? I'll sign up soon but may wait a little bit if they're still working stuff out.

I pushed the film last night to my 3rd-gen Apple TV using AirPlay and my iMac completely froze about 20 minutes into the movie; had to do a hard shutdown and restart. Everything has worked fine today, watching directly on the Mac. I'll try AirPlaying again tonight.

D.A. Pennebaker's first film, Daybreak Express, is just the sort of wonderful tidbit that makes this site worth the money to me. I never would have seen it if they hadn't paired it with the feature it ran with in 1958 (Neame's The Horse's Mouth). Filmstruck isn't perfect (all the hosted intros I've seen so far are horrible), but it's got a lot going for it.

Hosted intros? Don't like the sound of that.

Anyone know if FilmStruck is 1080p, as opposed to Hulu's 720p?

people on the Reddit Criterion/Filmstruck forums have complained about quality but Criterion-people seem borderline audiophilic in their craze for picture quality

If they're concerned about picture quality they shouldn't be streaming

^^^^^

AppleTV app is live

people on the Reddit Criterion/Filmstruck forums have complained about quality but Criterion-people seem borderline audiophilic in their craze for picture quality

They are basically the Steve Hoffman folk of the film world. BluRay era has been a golden age for system setup/region coding online dick-size contests.

A FB friend (who may be an ILXor, though I can't remember his screen name) who knows how to wrangle databases heard my plea last night and extracted the data from Filmstruck's "Browse All" source code that allowed me to make this:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TWx8-b5fbqenVr6r64hf3GktufPAgc61akPIvKoV2XA/edit?usp=sharing

A spreadsheet with Filmstruck's current offerings, sortable by title, director, year, runtime, country. Note 2 sheets, Basic Filmstruck and Criterion Channel. It may be less useful than the one I made of Criterion on Hulu, because films are being added and dropped much more frequently.

Thanks for that!

some surprising omissions: very little Minelli, only one Lubitsch, no Tod Browning, no Sturges, no Sirk, only a handful of Fellini, only one Cukor... plenty of oddball curation clearly swung by copyright ownership instead of best options too: four Robert Downey Sr. films but no Putney Swope?

xpost
You're welcome! I'm going to try to keep up with arrivals and departures to keep the spreadsheet up to date, but they are being VERY stupid about announcing that sort of stuff (I found out Mulholland Dr. is leaving the site at the end of January, but not from Filmstruck itself) so if anyone wants to mention comings and goings on this thread, that'd be great.

Nice list! Wow, that's a strong sales pitch...ugh. I'm really disappointed because the little Roku TV I bought this year for the living room has no option to turn off its (subtle, not always dstractingly present) soap-opera effect and by the time I was sure it wasn't my imagination, it was too late to return the thing. So now I'm sort of hesitant to plunk down for Filmstruck when it goes Roku since it'll be sabotaging the entire ''get myself educated in great film'' thing.

You might want to double check your TV settings re: soap opera effect. A friend had this issue, I had to go in and change her TV's settings on every input.

Oh believe me I've looked, through every menu and submenu. AFAICT it does not have any kind of off switch. It's definitely more pronounced on certain content but I suspect this may reflect arcane details of what framerate/medium the content provided to Netflix was inteded for. Robotech (the DVD version from the early 2000s) looked fine the entire way through. From Dusk Till Dawn made the actors look like plastic cutouts sliding wildly around the screen somehow moving a little faster than they should, especally any time the camera moved.

I keep praying for a firmware upgrade that fixes this but I doubt many folks are clamoring for it. Just pissed that the online reviews suggesting this was really the best option for this size TV never thought this was worth mentioning. Maybe earlier models didn't do this, or something.

It's classic that a thing happens and ILX's first reaction is to make a spreadsheet

::shrug::
for me, it's an easier way to browse

The in-app browsing system is not good! A spreadsheet is very helpful for this thing!

So the non-Criterion content is pretty meh, right? I was actually more interested in TCM-style films than Criterions.

Downhill Racer is only available this month, I see.

There was never going to be a lot of content that people would think of as "TCM-like" on this, and it seemed like they let a lot of people think otherwise.

makes you wonder what TCM even has to do with it? Why not just Criterion: the App?

Yeah, they've been unnecessarily vague about everything but the price.

A friend recommended the Warner Movie Archive for classic American stuff but the library looks pretty shallow even for a one-studio service and reviews were bad.

FS has legit shit quality streaming and they told me they wont have chromecast support until sometime next year

Shit quality like they're actually streaming in SD? Lots of compression artifacts? Stuff like that?

Lots added in the last few days.

Filmstruck:
Cairo Station
The Return of the Prodigal Son
The Sixth Day
The Sparrow
Saladin
Alexandria, Again and Forever
An Egyptian Story
The Land
Cairo As Told By Youssef Chahine

The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe
La Moutarde Me Monte au Nez
Paris 36

Criterion:
Koko: A Talking Gorilla
My Crasy Life
An Innocent Witch
A Story from Chikamatsu
Eternal Return, The
Endless Desire
Heat Wave; Oil-Hell Murder (both Hideo Gosha)
Poil de Carotte (Duvivier)
Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, The
Ask Father (Harold Lloyd short)
Boudu Saved from Drowning
Oliver Twist (Lean)
Courage for Every Day
Uncle Yanco (Varda)
Fear of Fear
Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven
American Soldier, The
Junkopia (Chris Marker)

Help Center is Helpful -- https://help.filmstruck.com/hc/en-us/

Movies leaving the service in the next 6 months: https://help.filmstruck.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000301047-Movies-Leaving-FIlmStruck

Available audio commentaries: https://help.filmstruck.com/hc/en-us/articles/232060448-List-of-Audio-Commentaries-in-FilmStruck

good stuff!

When they go Roku I think I'm totally in.

They said "early December" for the Apple TV and it was available on Dec. 1st. They're saying "early 2017" for Roku so I unrealistically have my hopes up for Jan. 1st.

Looking at that aforementioned list, it seemed like a million titles were leaving the service. Does that mean the Criterion Collection, assuming you pay for it, is a constant, but everything else comes and goes?

I think that's mostly true -- Downhill Racer and Mulholland Dr. are on short engagements on Criterion and I think they'll be gone from the site entirely.

I guess I should watch that huge collection of Chaplin Keystone/Essanay/Mutual shorts before they're gone on 4/21, because they're not on the Criterion side.

Even if you’re paying for the Criterion Collection, not all of the titles are available at once. I’m assuming they’re rotating that stuff, too.

I actually don't mind when streaming selections rotate, it helps me focus a bit better. The choice paralysis of the entire Criterion Collection, which would take how many years to watch their entirety, is overwhelming. Basically as it is with Netflix and Amazon not keep adding stuff to my watch list, and if it happens to be unavailable when I want to actually watch it, that's when I resort to downloading.

Yeah I can't imagine being in a situation on Filmstruck where it feels like there was nothing to watch. Rotate away.

23 films under 4 banners added on the Filmstruck side --

Alain Resnais
Errol Morris
Cinematography by Rudolph Maté
Behind the Iron Curtain

Withnail and I added on Criterion

Todd Haynes' Safe available until the end of this month, plus the supplemental bits (incl. Haynes' 1978 short "The Suicide") and the commentary track from the home release.

Come on, Roku ...

Haven't read the thread, but I skimmed this piece from a while back, which was not hopeful: http://www.thestreamingadvisor.com/2016/04/26/another-film-buff-service-really-turner-is-getting-streaming-wrong/

I dunno. I hope it sticks around. But I've got to admit, from a so-called "cord-cutter" perspective, I'm not a fan of the slow creep of services. Netflix, plus Amazon (which, granted, comes with many other benefits), plus Filmstruck, plus internet, plus phone, plus satellite radio, etc. Something has to give, eventually.

Putting a lot of energy into being a service for film buffs is like starting an athletic shoe company that specializes in turquoise equestrian gear.

This guy is full of shit. That analogy shows he is way outside Filmstruck's target demo and can't relate to anyone who's in it.

We just cancelled DirecTV on Sunday, freeing up $$$ to get what we actually want minus the home shopping and religious channels. I think that's a pretty common situation for cord- and dish-cutters.

That's how I feel, basically. I'll spend, as least to some extent, just not on the 90% of sports and reality shows and other bullshit I don't want. But I do agree Filmstruck's target demo is somewhat limited. Not a growth model.

really enjoying this service. agree it's not the biggest target demo, but every time i look for a movie on amazon or netflix it's just wall to wall shit so something like Filmstruck feels like an embarrassment of riches by comparison.

I had a brief Roku daydream that maybe Filmstruck's channel would be integrated with the Watch TCM channel, which according to TCM's device-activation page is "coming soon." But that's not really possible so I woke up.

Yeah people who CUT DA CORD to live on Netflix is like throwing out all your records to listen to Pandora

My wife is always trying to get me to listen to Pandora "if you like x, then ..." channels or whatever, and I keep telling her, I have the music I like and if I want to hear music I like I'm going to put on music I like, not hope that the algorithm driving the Dolly Parton channel or whatever will stick to classic country and not follow "Coat of Many Colors" with, like, something from Florida Georgia Line's Christmas album.

IDK cable TV seems to me to be at least 90% garbage or stuff totally outside my interests, at least whenever I'm at my relatives' for Christmas and spend any time surfing through it. So if I had that cord, cutting it would be more like getting rid of Pandora than getting rid of my record collection. I'm still interested in Filmstruck when it hits Roku and will almost certainly give it a try for a month or two, I mean it's cheaper than a single movie ticket or a few rentals so I don't have to watch THAT much for it to be worth it.

Might finally punt Netflix tbh - that's kept me looped in mostly because the person I share it with watches a fuckton of old TV shows on it while she's working, and because there's always at least ONE thing floating around in current rotation that I'm into, like my recent ill-advised Robotech binge. But my actual queue has had some of the same stuff in it for YEARS and if I've never felt compelled to finally sit down and watch it that's probably a sign. The overwhelming majority of new arrival stuff is about as interesting to me as what might be found clicking through the cable movie channels, nope, nope, nope, nope, ehhh maybe if I'm in the right mood, nope.....

DiretctTV/ATT app might be the best solution. Cut the cable cord (or just pay for internet), subscribe to DirectTV app for 30 bucks/mo and get all the live TV you want more or less? Just no DVR recording ability.

At this point I'm basically paying $8 a month for the Internet and $10 a month for Netflix, but I guess I should also count going to the movies in my budget for these things...

$8 for internet? How do you do that?

My wife last night, when we were going through these things, was asking if I was getting enough value out of Netflix, and I was like, what do you mean, like how many things do I have to watch for it to be worth it? And she said, yeah, I don't know, maybe three to make it make more sense than a la carte purchases? And I said whether I watched enough or not was moot, because I've downloaded a shit ton of stuff over the years for nada, and if paying a few streaming services makes me feel better then dammit, I'd say they're a bargain.

And then she asked to watch The Crown, and I restrained myself from saying "see, you need Netflix!"

Ha, it's an unusual situation - it's a big house, so we're splitting reasonably fast broadband twelve ways. Generally haven't had any speed issues or anything.

I pay for Hulu, Netflix, Filmstruck and Fandor.

Because I like throwing away money.

i am finally paring down but i had been doing hulu, netflix, filmstruck, amazon prime, hbo/showtime/cinemax/starz, cable, mubi

oh yeah I have amazon prime as well. My mom's HBO GO. And trying out seeso right now.

My biggest problem is I have Time Warner Cable which is now owned by Spectrum, and certain TV apps require a spectrium login but I don't have one.

6 months ago: Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, DirecTV - $125/month
Now: Amazon, Netflix, HBO, Filmstruck, Vue - $78/month

i pay for hulu and netflix

cancelled prime

if you want to penny pinch you can create new email addresses and sign up for free trials every so often

i opened a free trial acct on filmstruck and just cancelled

just cancelled this and Nightflight due to the terrible buffering problems on both platforms.

my issue is i have a kingsize tivo and options like vue that don't allow me to timeshift aren't of much use.

Yeah, losing the ability to record from TCM is a big downside for me.

I briefly borrowed a friend's dwindling Hulu subscription, since he didn't use it and was about to cancel, and I was shocked to find not just mandatory commercials, but mandatory shit commercials. It drove us nuts.

That's only if you're cheap. If you pay the extra few bucks you don't get commercials, or maybe only a few commercials on certain big shows, but I never see commercials.

ugh just gimme a damn roku or chromecast app ffs

I wish Criterion was still on Hulu so I could just, you know, watch this stuff on my TV.

Why can I not just stream TCM's catalog? Even just their on demand movies

If you have Fire TV, you can.

tbh, you can't so much. TCM's on demand program is pretty shitty.

yeah it's a shame. missing HD stuff too

Well this is a sucky development (from someone else's post at criterionforum.org):

http://i.imgur.com/dK6I3gZ.png

What's the hold up?

welp that's another six months I can spend ignoring this

oh fughaghdfhgkajrheruigh

does TCM at least have a Roku app I can use w/ a cable login?

Nope -- it's "coming soon"

we have Vue, Amazon & Netflix, and a hd antenna for local tv. we just did a free trial on hulu to see how it compared to vue but even though hulu has tons of channels, they are very patchworky on what *shows* they offer which is annoying. idk, i'm not sold on it. for my own viewing choices, i think i prefer vue.

fire tv is like 90 bucks if you really really want filmstruck now.

I mean, Ex0dus + access to a university library will tide me over until it's out, but I STILL WANT IT RN

I just ordered a Fire TV box (not only for FilmStruck, but it was a motivator), so now I'm getting ready to sign up for FS. What's the verdict from people who are on it, in terms of the different plans? I'm inclined to just go ahead and do the year subscription, which comes out to a little more than $8/month, but is there any reason to do a monthly plan in terms of waiting for them to work out technical issues or anything else?

Also, how good is the picture quality of their stream? Comparable to Netflix?

i just put on 8 1/2 on mute while listening to music and i was just thinking it looks great.

(im running ethernet into an apple tv)

Also, how good is the picture quality of their stream? Comparable to Netflix?

Yeah, though some of the transfers of minor films that don't rate a restoration are horrible. I watched Big Deal on Madonna Street last night and it looked bad, but not because of the stream. I should go ahead and bump my subscription from monthly to the annual price.

BTW, 25 films added Friday on the Filmstruck side under 5 banners:
— Paris, City of Love (including Billy Wilder's Irma La Douce and Martin Ritt's Paris Blues, for the people who want more TCM-type stuff)
— Directed by Terry Gilliam
— Directed by Dušan Makavjev
— the Qatsi trilogy
— The Yugoslav Wars and their Aftermath

Cool, thx. Guess I'll do the annual and see how it goes! I figured there would be variations in picture quality depending on the prints.

Logorama, the short added for today's short + feature, is one of the funniest things I've seen in a while.

Very excited that Ingmar Bergman's "The Magic Flute" (1975) was added to the Criterion section this week. Always wanted to see that.

Kiarostami's Certified Copy added on the Criterion side. Supplements include his 1977 feature The Report.

All the Kurosawas are leaving the Filmstruck side after this coming Friday, but Ran is the only one not on the Criterion side as well.

I worry by the time this thing is actually available on Roku or Chromecast it will have completely lost momentum and be on the brink of folding

I was going to watch Ran tonight but it's already gone — all the Kurosawas were taken down from the Filmstruck side sometime during the day today.

Somebody on criterionforum.org figured out that the URL of Filmstruck's bundles/banners ended with steadily increasing numbers, so they counted ahead and found this for the next Tuesday Short + Feature:
https://watch.filmstruck.com/#!/bundle/1520000290

So I kept going and found what looks like the next Friday Double Feature, two Dirk Bogarde films:
https://watch.filmstruck.com/#!/bundle/1520000292

And the next Observations on Film Art, Kristin Thompson on landscape in Kiarostami:
https://watch.filmstruck.com/#!/bundle/1520000293

I tried posting about those last two at the Criterion Forum, but as a noob, my first five posts have to be approved by a moderator, and this one was disapproved because it "does not make a contribution to the ongoing discussion."

The bundle placeholders are there for the next month's worth of Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday specials, but I won't spoil anything unless y'all want me to.

One intriguing thing was something called the "C.R. Barker Collection." The only thing google brought up for that name was co-author of a biography of Erich Maria Remarque.

oh hey chromecast

Contemporary Israeli Cinema, John Ford in the 30s, and Chantal Akerman are leaving the Filmstruck side later this week. Which films in those are must-not-miss?

Akerman's News From Home is pretty fascinating.

Fortunately that one's staying on the Criterion side.

Neo-noir, Animation for Adults, Made for the U.N., Seventeen Moments of Spring banners leaving this week. Ace in the Hole leaves early next week. BTW, films leave at midnight GMT of the date listed, which means 7 p.m. EST on the day before. Sneaky fuckers.

Roku?

"spring"

are they still having massive buffering issues?

I haven't had any myself, but I've been reading about them. I get a lot of hangups at the login process, but if I open a new tab and retry it, I always get in the 2nd time.

I have HBO, PBS, Sundance, etc., and FilmStruck streams better than any of them on Apple TV.

added Putney Swope which is a lot of fun

Watched it tonight -- great.

Spoiler: tomorrow's Criterion Collection Edition is going to be Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg.

+ 15 supplements, holy shit

https://watch.filmstruck.com/#!/bundle/1520000315

Roku pushed back to May.

Interest in this service pushed back even further. Why the delay?

Isn't Roku just a delivery vector?

I have no idea why, and good luck prying any info out of them. Fuckers. I bought a Roku instead of Apple TV because I thought "oh a couple of months delay between device rollouts won't be too big a deal."

you still made the right choice

This is handy.
http://criterioncast.com/news/all-of-the-films-joining-filmstrucks-criterion-channel-this-april

Finally watched Come and See. Caring for a newborn it took me about two weeks of watching it in 5 to 20 minute chunks. Not ideal, but wow, what a movie.

Per help desk chat a few minutes ago, Roku availability is now "late May to mid-June."

I was irritated that Happy Together disappeared from Amazon before I had a chance to see it, but Filmstruck is starting a program of LGBTQ films on June 2nd that includes it.

A JIHAD FOR LOVE
PARTING GLANCES
WORD IS OUT
THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK
BORN IN FLAMES
THE WATERMELON WOMAN
JEFFREY
ANOTHER COUNTRY
STEAM: THE TURKISH BATH
QUERELLE
WILD REEDS
VICTIM
HAPPY TOGETHER

The Roku channel is live.

lmao it's amazing how little I've grown to care about this. I still never even signed up for a free trial. Have the buffering issues improved? I wonder how they're doing business-wise.

i signed up a couple weeks ago, and I'm really enjoying it. I haven't had any issues with buffering at all.

No buffering problems for me. Once a week or so it'll hang up on me moving from one part of the service to another, like from Criterion main screen to my watchlist, but overall it's pretty smooth. I wish their color scheme wasn't so black/white/gray – they could use the red from their logo to indicate selection and it would be a lot easier to navigate.

The biggest problem with this service is that there's too damn much to choose from. Between the Filmstruck side and Criterion side, they have about 1700 films, enough choice to be paralyzing. Which is great, but coming up with navigation strategies other than just looking at their featured banners is on the viewer – they don't make things any easier.

Of all the apps I use on Apple TV, FilmStruck streams the best; rarely have I had any buffering issues. The interface is also gorgeous and well-organized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_music

Ha, whoops. So it's finally available for Roku. Is it still hemorrhaging content beyond the Criterion Collection?

I'm not sure what you mean. On the Filmstruck side, every Thursday a 2-3 banners are dropped, and every Friday 2-3 banners are added. They said from the beginning that films would be rotated in and out; they stay steady at ~500 films, and the Criterion channel is up to ~1200.

Gotcha. Just wanted to make sure that was the strategy rather than a struggled to show there's value in Filmstruck beyond the CC. When I looked at the site yesterday (since it just became available for Roku and I'm out of the country I haven't signed up yet) I saw this long list of movies leaving Filmstruck, and I was bummed, because as great as the CC is (and honestly there's little more a film fan needs), there was all sorts of good stuff leaving. So as long as new good stuff comes in and not, say, a bunch of shit, I'm cool with rotation.

There is a huge amount leaving in the next month, it's true – Resnais, Sayles and Errol Morris alone in one week.

Guess I should buy a subscription!

Better hurry, those three banners (plus the "Behind the Iron Curtain" banner that includes Petzold's Barbara and the Cinematography by Rudolph Mate banner) are leaving this Thursday evening; 26 films total, 8 of which will stay on the Criterion side.
https://help.filmstruck.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000301047-Movies-Leaving-FilmStruck

I'm loving this. Cancelled cable (which I mostly had for TCM). Various bugs exist but they are obvious & will be ironed out. After dealing with the screaming red hell of Netflix it's so nice to have a soothing gray-colored adulty service, a fairly curated list where nearly everything is good.

OK, signed up. Confused, though - it's not the complete Criterion Collection? They have pretty much everything from Kieslowski, for example, but not Dekalog, which is a bummer.

Yeah things cycle in and out. I thought that would bum me out -- how incredible it would be to have all 800 of those. But the curation has worked out really well; I don't go scrolling for choices for 2 hours. The key might be bookmarking this link:

https://www.filmstruck.com/coming-soon

Pretty good July coming on the Criterion side. http://criterioncast.com/news/all-of-the-films-joining-filmstrucks-criterion-channel-this-july

I think we may have answered this before but does anything ever *leave* the Criterion Channel?

Not unless they lose the rights.

Some stuff is added for very short streaming engagements. Sometimes they make note of it on the film's banner (Downhill Racer, Ace in the Hole, Heaven's Gate, Safe, the 1961 Something Wild) and sometimes they don't (Bitter Victory, the 1986 Something Wild). Flight of the Red Balloon and Blow Out came and went but I can't remember if they had a "limited engagement" note.

Tourneur's Cat People is leaving Friday but there's no note on the banner. 12 Angry Men is leaving on 7/31 but there's no note. I think the trick is to look for things that are leaving on the last day of the month no matter what day of the week that is -- those tend to be the few films leaving the Criterion channel.

Yeah, the quick cycling in and out has forced me to forgo the whole "100 movies in my queue om nom nom" aspirational viewing habit that streaming has helped create in me, and just enjoy something they have at the moment. It was annoying at first but now ultimately feels a little liberating?

And you can always lie about watching it!

xpost Though all I've really watched recently is 'Blood Simple' :/

i'm into this! last night i watched Peter Weir's THE PLUMBER and it was great

It was annoying at first but now ultimately feels a little liberating?

Yeah, with 1500+ movies to choose from I'm def glad to have a little push in any direction. I might have half-assed around and never seen A Separation if it hadn't had an expiration date. -- xp

Yeah, there must be some sort of psychological explanation for it - choice paralysis? - but I do know that when Netflix started hiding when its movies were leaving I started watching less on Netflix.

imho all services of this type should default to a view of six movies picked at random from your list, with nothing else to click down to or scroll past unless you enter a special code or beat a minigame or something. really focus on those six, to simulate your friend meeting back up with you after you've both been walking around the video store for half an hour: it's gonna be one of these. pick one!

One of Kenji Mizoguchi's only 2 color films, Princess Yang Kwei-Fei, is added on the Criterion side.

A "Directed by Terry Zwigoff" banner's going up this evening, including Crumb, my #1 in the documentary poll Clemenza ran.

I was about to finally pull the trigger on this the other day before realizing that my laptop is the only device I can use to watch it. Which is pretty effing lame. So no-go, I guess.

i recently have been enjoying the "actuality dramas" of Allan King -- Come On, Children and Warrenville so far -- and the short Asparagus, which was super weird and enjoyable.

Was thinking of pulling the trigger until I learned that, as of today, my NYPL card entitles me to ten Criterions per calendar month.

We just added this the other day so haven't actually watched a ton on it. I watched In A Lonely Place and On The Bowery earlier this week as well as a Les Blank short I hadn't seen before.

I'm interested in the Italian crime TV drama that is on there - has anyone watched it?

Alex Lifeson is one of the teens in Come On, Children!
Not that this would make you want to watch it but it's pretty good regardless

i should say "the teen who become known as Alex Lifeson"
he had a different name back then
there's even a scene with his parents about his lack of prospects as a guitar player

Ian, It sounded like Some More Sopranos, so I passed.

LL, I loved Warrendale and A Married Couple -- I'll add Come On Children and Dying at Grace to my queue (which is already too long).

The bad writing and editing on their editorial side drives me nuts -- "Alice Kominsky Crumb," "Christopher Plumber" guuuhhhh

Yeah, some of the copy is pretty dire.

Decided to watch "Sapphire" this evening.

i was afraid to watch A Married Couple!

I approached it as sort of a...hysterically funny horror movie.

I haven't had too much time to dive in, watched one of the Apu films, but I'm glad I signed up. I wanted to pick a movie to watch with my older daughter, and I was going to give her the choice of Oliver Twist or Grand Illusion or Seven Samurai. I pressured her into the last, and while she seemed to enjoy it the enthusiasm was limited and relative, since I think we only saw 30 minutes of it (ha). But it's a start! Grand Illusion (for subtitles) and Oliver Twist (for craft) might be more her speed.

Watched Visions (the movie about Hildegard) and Koko: A Talking Gorilla (1978, pre-kitten) would recommend both.

Vision, seconded. Not a Criterion, I don't think, but would also recommend a somewhat similar film, I, The Worst of All/Yo, la peor de todas, which is about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

ooh that sounds good. i'm kind of nunned out after that one but i'm sure my appetite will come back ;)

Best to steer clear of Black Narcissus for the time being as well then

I should join.

Black Narcissus is second to nun.

^^^ lol

I should join.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, August 8, 2017 12:08 PM

Its only real drawback is a paralyzing surfeit of choices.

for me it is the creeping feeling that i am hiding from reality in an artsy hole, but if i have to hide in a hole it's not a bad one to steal away to

oh also we started watching Bigger Than Life, which I am totally enjoying as well

would buy a "yay for the artsy hole" t-shirt

http://criterioncast.com/news/all-of-the-films-joining-filmstrucks-criterion-channel-this-september

I may only get to watch a few things on here a month, but I love having the channel and its choices.

started watching ROMANZO CRIMINALE, the Italian crime series I mentioned upthread. I like it a lot. I never watched the Sopranos so I can't say much in that regard, but the vibe is good, there's a lot going on, and it's nice to see all the footage of Italy, where I have never been. Certainly my interest in this show is DEFINITELY in its basis on a Giancarlo di Cataldo novel -- the novel hasn't been published in the US (yet?) but there's a UK edition. I'm reading right now a translation of another di Cataldo novel, Suburra, which I'm loving. So I'm kind of on the hardboiled Italian crime vibe right now. And over the last few years I've read tons of Massimo carlotto.. anyhoo, rambling here, but I'm definitely "on board" with this show for now. I wish I knew more about the history of communism v fascism in italy..

I know not many series are on Filmstruck, but it's really atrocious trying to navigate these episodes. They aren't in order no matter how you look at them, when you finish an episode it seems you just have to search for the episodes or browse for them. Sigh.

hooked on RC btw.

Excited for all the Godards I've never found streaming before, added today.

One month engagements of Crit collected editions for October will include On the Waterfront and Harold and Maude.

All Night Long -- British-made take on Othello, set in London jazz world, real-time during a party -- is quite good, and I'd never heard of it.

i want to get this for the t.v. in the bedroom but i would have to hook my computer up to the t.v. and i hate doing stuff like that.

my t.v. gets netflix (which we subscribe to) and youtube. so i watch netflix. and every film noir movie on youtube.

maybe i will go full roku someday.

( i do still miss criterion on hulu...which we have downstairs on the PS4...)

can you get a chromecast and stream it to your tv?

I've been enjoying Kanopy with my LA library card. It has most Criterion films streaming, although not as many as Filmstruck. That said, it's free.

For a few weeks, the Filmstruck channel on Roku had a massive bug — going from the app to the Roku home screen caused the device to do a hard restart. It was still doing it as late as last Friday but it looks like they've fixed it.

scott - chromecast. get it. no computer necessary.

i find their practice of using b/w photos for color movies really distracting
idk why they would do this

we watched Norma Rae recently and it was great

Scott, a roku box is really cheap... like, one wall record cheap.

We got kanopy like a month after we subscribe to filmstruck. There are some hoops to jump through for the former though. I think you can only watch 10 movies a month, and you have to watch them within 3 days.

Yes, it's not straightforward, but again, free.

Sadly, it's been a very long time since a 10 movie/month limit would be a problem for me!

i've got kanopy through the university, but it requires a vpn which then makes chromecasting impossible.

Kanopy is great tho how many plays you get depends on the deal struck by your library/institution. However the Roku app, at least on my Roku TV, is complete garbage - buggy as hell, awkward to navigate (tho not as bad as nu-Hulu) and the subtitle tracks are like 15 seconds in advance of the film, rendering all foreign films unwatchable. They've told me by email they're working on it. :-/

Romanzo Criminale is leaving on Sept 29, FYI. I check this page periodically: https://www.filmstruck.com/us/coming-soon

The Ross McElwee docs are leaving in a week, you don't want to miss those. They are unique.

"(tho not as bad as nu-Hulu)"

OMG, this is one of those cases where i really think a company is doing something to fuck with me personally. like they know it will drive me insane.

i will look into chrome/roku. i probably don't need more ways to watch hours of t.v. but i do miss having criterion at my fingertips even if i often ended up watching more episodes of Nikita when i meant to watch some chantal akerman movie i hadn't seen.

xpost yeah what in the fuck is wrong with them? i had only recently gotten oldHulu installed cause spotify just declared I had a free subscription (tho with such an obscene quantity of commercials that watching TV shows isn't worth fucking with), had fun loading up my watchlist with MOR blockbuster rental quality stuff, and then like three days later it morphed into this unbrowsable monstrosity

was wondering about the TCM content and looking at the website i can't help but notice that there are only five westerns listed. which is kinda sad.

i don't know why companies feel the need to do that. hulu wasn't perfect but jesus there wasn't anything really wrong with how it looked and it was easy to use. i'm guessing they made it more phone-friendly in some way that escapes me? i don't watch stuff on phones.

i think everyone i know had the same reaction to nu-hulu. i think it's an result of people needing to keep their jobs and ABC (always be creating) -- sometimes a thing just needs maintenance, not innovation. this is the world we live in i guess.

http://criterioncast.com/news/all-of-the-films-joining-filmstrucks-criterion-channel-this-october

I've been having trouble with streaming on my Roku TV recently. Tried to watch "Tabloid" but the sound wouldn't synch and the picture kept breaking up. Everything streams fine on my AppleTV.

crikey...

https://www.britbox.com/

oh.. i guess i should have read this thread a couple days ago.
now how do i see the end of romanzo criminale??

hulu SUCKS i want to cancel it honestly.

also anytime i try to go to the homescreen from filmstruck i'm still getting a reset..

I had that problem on my Roku but it seems to have been fixed in the last 2-3 days.

Also in the "classy" movie-streaming market: has anyone tried Fandor? They're doing some promotion through MoviePass to try and hook me on $2/month... that's pretty cheap so I probably should just say what the heck, but I already feel like with Kanopy I do have a reasonable number of "good movies" on easy tap...

I have fandor and filmstruck but never watch either because I'm busy.

however, fandor is great, more cult and avant garde type stuff. midnight movies, experimental film etc.

Some great stuff on filmstruck right now. I had totally forgotten about A Boy and His Dog, which I have somehow never seen. Boy, George Miller sure borrowed a lot from this. Unless it's all in the novella.

couldn't get more than a few minutes into that one when my friend and I tried it a while back :-/ liked the setting and stuff but the sexual violence was very jarring and jarringly handled, for us.

FilmStruck & Shudder -- I need nothing else to subsist!

xpost The sexual violence is one of the things George Miller took.

They're adding Twin Peaks: FWWM on Nov. 16th as a CC Edition, and it will include The Missing Pieces.

http://onvideo.org/criterion-channel-announces-nov-programming/

Imamura's The Pornographers is one I was just checking for the other day; nice to see it will be available soon.

I couldn't get my Filmstruck Roku app to load today ...

Even though the more canonical arthouse films tend to be on Filmstruck, I've watched more things on Fandor more for some reason. Maybe its eclecticism is more inviting. It probably helps that I've never had issues with Fandor on the Roku, where Filmstruck wasn't on it for quite a while; just a few days ago I needed to log in to the Filmstruck app again.

cool, thanks y'all! I'll mull it. though tbh the moviepass itself keeps me busy enough so maybe this shd just be a year of hitting the theater as much as possible

filmstruck takes fucking forever to load lol

FilmStruck & Shudder -- I need nothing else to subsist!

My man

FilmStruck and Shudder exist and are totally affordable but the media elite is tweeting about spending their weekends watching 8 hours of "Guys, E.T. Rubiks Cube Toto"

shudder is such an incredible deal

I'm in. Just watched only my second Naruse.

filmstruck takes fucking forever to load lol

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40)

this is a problem yeah

Sympathies to everyone who's had that problem, but it zips along for me. Even when it crashed my Roku whenever I used the app, it loaded fine and let me finish watching something first.

the Henson shorts are super enjoyable
Drum West especially, but all the ones I watched were good.

I just finished a work production deadline and am looking forward to diving in to a lot of Henson. And Haneke, but probably not at the same time.

Alfred, if you find the idea of browsing 1500 titles to be just too much, here's a thing I maintain: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TWx8-b5fbqenVr6r64hf3GktufPAgc61akPIvKoV2XA/edit#gid=556920267

Ian, it looks like Romanzo Criminale is back for about five weeks.
https://www.filmstruck.com/us/watch/bundle/1520000202

18 Bill Morrison films yessss

thanks for the spreadsheet william ... this is nice!

My pleasure! It was a case of "if you want Filmstruck to do something right, you've got to do it yourself." Probably obvious, but red = expired and blue/yellow = I've seen. Light green = started it, hated it, bailed early.

haha now I want to see what you light greened

Not too many. Track 29, Desert Hearts and Rendez-vous were real cases of 'ugh, crap." With Sweet Movie it was a case of "ok, interesting hammer but could you stop hitting me with it?" and I just didn't have the stomach to stay with Benny's Video last week, the USA has my nerves on edge.

You didn't like Desert Hearts? I enjoyed that one.

When I saw Sweet Movie i was in a class called The Films of Dusan Mackavejev being taught by an expert on eastern european cinema, and his giving us a thorough background and understanding of yugoslavian history made Sweet Movie a lot more enjoyable.

Mainly I thought the acting was terrible -- kind of baffled at the praise for Shaver in the lead. xp

I think I would have enjoyed Sweet Movie with added history/context.

Have really been enjoying the Bill Morrison collection!! Who By Water especially because 1) Vuh-y score and 2) people basically nonstop staring in the camera https://vimeo.com/48669901

Yes, I'm loving the Morrison. Were you at Big Ears the year they showed The Great Flood with Bill Frisell and band doing the score live? I don't remember if that was this year or 2015 or earlier.

That's a shame WilliamC, I thought Desert Hearts was really nice. Loved Shaver especially, but both leads were quite brave and sweet IMO

WMC - No! I didn't see that!! Dang

We have watched 3-4 of them so far, and Porch is the only one I was unmoved by. It was fine but not essential.

The UK version, Filmstruck Curzon, is up and running.
https://www.filmstruck.com/uk/#

FilmStruck, Turner’s streaming service for movies, is partnering with Warner Bros. Digital Networks (WBDN) and adding some new features that will expand its film library to some Hollywood classics. As part of the venture, Warner Archive will sunset its service effective immediately, with current subscribers being transitioned to a FilmStruck subscription.

Beginning today, FilmStruck subscribers in the US will get hundreds of new movies and streaming access to films from the Warner Bros. classic film library, including Casablanca, Rebel Without a Cause, Singin’ In the Rain, Citizen Kane, The Music Man, Bringing Up Baby, The Thin Man, Cat People, A Night At The Opera, An American In Paris, and Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

http://deadline.com/2018/02/filmstruck-adds-warner-bros-films-as-warner-archive-sunsets-1202301824/

Awesome, how about Leone?

no results found

"Beginning today, FilmStruck subscribers in the US will get hundreds of new movies" is an error in Deadline's story. Filmstruck's Tumblr has this: "We’re also adding hundreds of classic films over the next few months."

Today's additions are a 22-film TCM Select bundle, a 23-film Bette Davis bundle, and the complete Astaire-Rogers (10 films).

When the TCM Select stuff rolled out this week, I decided it was too much to keep updating my spreadsheet, which I was adding to line by line. Providence (and Reddit) sent along some guy who knows his web-scraping shit and created this a couple of days ago: hxxp://www.disobey.com/wiki/FilmStruck

bookmarked, thanks!

Again and again lately I'm thwarted by Filmstruck. Decalogue's not there, and there's no Spinal Tap; both are ostensibly Criterion, both currently AWOL. Then they get the big WB collection, but no Treasure of the Sierra Madre, no Sergio Leone, no etc. Obviously there are tons of other options there, but still bummed.

There are plenty of Criterion movies that aren't there, but they get rotated in and out. Same for WB.

Yeah, I know. I just haven't seen them rotated in for a long, long while.

Spinal Tap Criterion is out of print, which might mean they don't have the rights anymore

Criterion Spinal Tap is literally why I bought a DVD player way back when.

Why don't you watch your DVD then?

No longer own a DVD player. Well, it's somewhere, but I don't know where it is. I think So: laziness/convenience. And not wanting or needing DVDs is why I subscribe to Filmstruck/Netflix in the first place.

You can currently rent it from Apple, Microsoft, Vudu or the PlayStation Store

Or you can get some nerds to act out all the scenes for you

It's really not that complicated. I know it's not gone forever from every place. The reason I pay for Filmstruck and Netflix is to watch movies on Filmstruck and Netflix.

The reason you pay for Filmstruck and Netflix is that culture started priding convenience over quality

Not your fault, obviously, but we should all temper our expectations to this new reality if we're going to help fund it

Netflix= Stuff you probably wouldn't have paid for back in the video store days but hey there it is

Filmstruck= This is easier than riding a bike to the library all the time

whiney otm in last 2 posts

Kanopy -- which is free if you have a library card -- just added most (or maybe all?) of Fred Wiseman's documentaries.

Anybody got Filmstruck UK? Been thinking of ditching Mubi for it and wondered what selection was like.

i get kanopy through my employer (public university), but it requires vpn so i can't chromecast it. it's a bummer.

FWIW I don't use VPN and I do use Chromecast.

Watched "Hospital" last night. Some haunting stuff in there.

yah my employer requires the vpn to access it, not kanopy.

wait which library did you use to access it? maybe i'm not trying hard enough.

Alfred, if you find the idea of browsing 1500 titles to be just too much, here's a thing I maintain: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TWx8-b5fbqenVr6r64hf3GktufPAgc61akPIvKoV2XA/edit#gid=556920267

― WilliamC, Saturday, November 4, 2017 5:17 PM (six months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is great but what does the color coding mean?

The yellow and blue fields were for films I've seen. Red was for films that had expired and weren't available anymore. Every now and then there's a bit of green for films that I started, really hated, and quit watching before the end. I haven't updated that spreadsheet in more than 2 months -- when the huge amount of TCM Select stuff went live I gave up. I thought that spreadsheet at disobey.com (linked upthread) would be a good replacement, but it hasn't been updated in over a month. :(

if You Gotta Move is still on there, i think everyone should watch it
i visited the school after seeing the movie -- that's how good it was

sorry it is GOT TO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Got_to_Move

Filmstruck added The Night of Truth, Kabala, Hyenas, Guelwaar, Dreams of Dust, Sembene, Xala, and Yeelen today

— &rew (@hedgetheater) May 18, 2018

Launching in France and Spain.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/time-warners-movie-streaming-service-filmstruck-launch-france-spain-1114568

The Other Side of Hope coming June 29th

Bill Morrison docs are leaving soon I hear -- and I was wondering if anyone else has trouble with them? Like staggering video?

I've been blessedly free of playback problems since the service started. I see loads of frustrations on places like Criterionforum.org and their Facebook page, but I've had pretty smooth sailing. Maybe one or two glitches.

so nothing on the morrison films? someone else i asked said that she did have issues. i wonder what the problem is?

maybe it's like only for roku users or something
god i hate companies so much

so to watch in browser you need to enable adobe flash?

fraid so

Okay, since Criterions mostly dried up from Kanopy, finally going to have to give this a try.

I had high hopes for the King Kong audio commentary, but there's not much to it really. Harryhausen and Ralston chat while watching the film but don't have much to say beyond "ahh, that's a terrific matte painting there." Merian Cooper and Fay Wray's contributions are cut in from other talks, and almost an hour into it, Wray's only contribution so far is "One nice thing about the picture is that we all remained friends."

I love the long overture or original music that's included at the beginning of "Kong." I wish more prints of vintage movies would include those if available.

Filmstruck now launching in the UK. Free 14 day trial, approx. £6 a month depending on whether you pay monthly or annually. Looking at the UK website so far, the Criterion titles are restricted to those that have been issued on blu ray in the UK, and even then it's not every title. They've also got a deal w/ Curzon/Artificial Eye to include some of their titles too. All in all, a much bigger selection than on MUBI, but MUBI often has films that are otherwise unavailable to view in the UK, whereas there don't seem to be anything that out of the ordinary on Filmstruck so far (plus I get a free subscription to MUBI as part of my Glasgow Film Theatre membership).

Was going to dump Mubi for Filmstruck earlier this month when my annual sub ran out, however they offered a year for £22.99 so am sticking with them, at least for another year. Will probably get Filmstruck soon. but hoping their library gets a bit deeper.

RIP: https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/filmstruck-shutdown-warnermedia-turner-1202998364/

shutting down at the end of november

pretty pissed about this

Well, shit.

what the fuck

Aww. Well, I guess that saves me a few bucks each month. I wish I had more time to watch stuff while it lasted.

farewell to the films truck

fuuuuuuuck

goddammit

at least i have shudder the only other good streaming service? this fucking sucks

this makes me very sad

it never came to canada AFAIK but I'd have checked it out. feeling better and better about stockpiling physical media tbh

put everyone who talks like this out on ice floes for the sake of humanity pic.twitter.com/44BFCSYSSg

— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) October 26, 2018

@ brad - depending on your needs, fandor is like $7/month or something, not a filmstruck-level library but if you watch a few things a month you can think of it like having a video rental place w a reasonably fun indie/foreign/cult section.

kanopy, if your local library has a contract with them, if free and has great collections (difft lineups for different libraries, kind of confusing) but absolutely garbage software/interface.

I love Mubi, but that's obviously not an extensive library

physical media forevah

Ugh. Where will the Criterions play?

Nowhere, for the moment.

@ brad - depending on your needs, fandor is like $7/month or something, not a filmstruck-level library but if you watch a few things a month you can think of it like having a video rental place w a reasonably fun indie/foreign/cult section.

this is great to know, thank you!

Don’t dig Fandor that much, sorry

I don't see the Hulu deal restarting or Netflix shelling money for this library, and Criterion doesn't have the pockets to do a standalone service. They need a big partner and the big partners are drying up.

seems a bad situation-- art film streaming service is not profitable enough for a huge corporation, and a smaller company doesn't have the money to license all these art films

physical media forevah

piracy forevah

This is sad, I was also waiting for it to launch in Canada. Before Filmstruck, Criterion had licensed a big chunk of its library to other streaming services that had a big institutional subscriber bases - libraries, universities - and maybe it'll return to that in the meantime?

Kanopy and AlexanderStreet are two of these which, independently of Criterion/Filmstruck, I'd recommend anyone to check out if they haven't heard of them. If your municipal library is signed up, all you need is an active library card to login and have access on your computer/device.

ymmv on fandor obv - i def haven't used it as much as i might cause it came free with moviepass for some reason, and at the time, moviepass was still usable so obviously i instead went and saw fandor-type movies at the theater, like velvet goldmine. and now it's competing with sinemia and kanopy time i guess. but i've watched some of yr bof-standard silent-film canon (caligari, the general) and some fun cult classic type stuff on it like Death Race 2000 and Dark Star and a bunch of jim henson stop motion shorts from the 60s. not sure where else i would have streamed The Point!. etc.. and sooner or later i'll sit down and take in the careers of bava and argento, some of the herzog classics, etc.

that's just to sketch it out (you can browse the whole catalog on the web w/o subscribing) and by no means does it occupy the same niche as filmstruck. in terms of lineup, kanopy is way closer. but depending on your tastes it might be nice to have.

I've been using Kanopy cuz it's free through my university.

hope criterion comes back to hulu

my household is super bummed about this
even the dogs

so much streaming garbage out there, i will miss u filmstruck
goddamn companies

Mmmmmmmaybe they'll make a deal to be a part of the HBO/Warner/Turner streaming service coming next year, but I'm not holding my breath.

I haven't seen this much collective mourning on my twitter feed since ... well, ever.

a bunch of criterion/janus never left kanopy but it can be elusive, and hard to even really take a head count because there are many titles (not criterion specific) that i can watch through my public library membership but NOT my university one. depending which membership you have toggled to "active," the other titles just don't appear when browsing, but DO still sit in your watchlist, BUT can't be actually played if it turns out they're gone from all your memberships. this is only one of a dozen needlessly clunky features, the worst tho are the consistent roku bugs that mean watching with subtitles on my TV has remained a complete crapshoot for more than a year. you get what you pay for i guess but it'd be cool if libraries would demand these people maintain an easier-to-use product. don't get me started on the pagination woes.

interface on Kanopy has been fine for me on phone, except for clicking to see why a single film was listed as a collection of two, and it starting to play & thus using one of my five-films-a-month (restriction of the Seattle Public Library)

i cringe to imagine clicking page by tedious page through my 17-page watchlist on a phone. also iirc you can't search by terms like "kurosawa" though perhaps that's been fixed

haven't tried to use Kanopy on my phone, but the search function on it's webpage allows a search by director, which is really nice (that is one of my gripes with Netflix). It doesn't feel to me that the interface there is much different from other streaming services. You can add films to your watchlist so they are available when you go in to the app on your tv screen.

I didn't realize that individual libraries make different content available. SFPL I know has the complete Janus Criterion collection as well as many others

17-page watchlist

with only 5 films per month, I have not been that profligate with my watchlisting, admittedly

oh, it's definitely annoying that a 2-minute cartoon counts as as much as a 5.5-hour documentary toward that limit.

I know we have Criterion excluded on our school's Kanopy service because it costs $150 to activate a film for a year, and we only want to pay for films used in classes etc.

sic get a job at the UW, exploit some library privileges

yeah i imagine kanopy must offer a few standard packages to customers, university one maybe heavier on canonical classics for the learning youth, city library one heavier on contemporary foreign/indie/docs for the NPR set? just guessing tho.

ymmv obv but the pagination killlls the browsing for me. like netflix and co have figured this out more or less, just let me scroll thru everything i've put in my queue and see what i'm in the mood for (and if you really wanna blow my mind, let me sort that list by year/name/genre instead of always being most-recently-added). having to click "next page" a dozen times is wack. it's lots of little stuff like that - removing a movie from your watchlist on page 15 bumps you back up to page one. if you're browsing through a genre and click into a movie to get the full details, clicking back out dumps you at the top of the genre. there's no simple "recently added" page so you have to check individual genres and overlapping ad-hoc categories. etc. etc. sorry to rant, it's just a design bummer cause the catalog's amazing and there is never going to be any organized pressure from their customers to refine any of this.

obv the watchlist is longer than whatever i'll get to in a month or a year but i tend to load up lists with whatever on a service looks interesting so that when i sit down to pick something out i can just look at my watchlist.

if Apple's smart they'll grab this up for their new service next year

wish npr or pbs or somesuch had the resources to step into this space, sigh.

Well, guess I won't be signing up to Filmstruck after all :-( I like Mubi but really could do with an alternative.

there's a "recently added" strip right at the top of the Kanopy mobile app, that scrolls and scrolls :)

(and a recently added docos underneath The Criterion Collection)

For all but the very obsessive, the whole "this is why you should own a vast and expensive personal library of movies you'll probably only watch once or twice" line is just bonkers to me.

For all but the very obsessive,

exactly

yeah the real thing to lament is the death of physical-media video stores (or even o.g. DVD-by-mail netflix) which were actually the right medium between owning-forever and never-seeing.

didn't realize that abt the app, might have to install it just to spare myself the clicking around on the web.

Kanopy is awesome, but I agree the interface sucks

not sure what the o.g. version of netflix was but the current dvd-by-mail selection is amazing!

ha i didn't even realize it still existed. i remember an article a couple years ago on how limited and unreliable it'd actually become since they weren't replacing lost/destroyed discs so tons of bog-standard stuff had quietly become not-actually-gettable. but i'm probably fogging up the details.

Netflix DVD-by-mail has more films available than Netflix streaming

For all but the very obsessive, the whole "this is why you should own a vast and expensive personal library of movies you'll probably only watch once or twice" line is just bonkers to me.

think of the question as being "do you want to watch them once"

Criterions have good resell value anyway

xp yes, if you're into classic cinema or world cinema, there's no comparison between netflix DVD and streaming services

I think it was after they did the “directed by Raoul Walsh” collection I thought how dies this exist? This is too good to be true

For the hundred bucks I'll save for not having a year of Filmstruck and its 1000-1200 options, I'll be able to buy 4-5 Criterion home releases (during half-off sales), or half of next month's Bergman box.

losing disc-by-mail maybe the worst thing about moving to Canada tbrr

honestly, cost-proposition wise Netflix and Amazon Prime are still insane for what you get. but they'll never have everything, all the time, hence physical media worth buying and supporting for sure. also, the way history has been, whatever supplants Blu-ray will still publish less titles in the end, the way there were more DVDs than BR, more VHS than DVD..

lame, I was just thinking of signing up for this

Stupid:

Streaming is a scam that conditions consumers to forget the importance and necessity of ownership, to instead subscribe to the profit-maximizing whims of a megacorporation. Continued unabated, it will mutilate the history of film and music. Tech isn’t going to save us.

— Scary Kaleb Horton (@kalebhorton) October 26, 2018

Streaming has stymied piracy better than any other digital model. The mechanism is in place to finally properly pay artists (even if they aren't doing it now) & more accurately track ears/eyeballs.

flappy is a BigTech sock

I doubt there will be a successor optical medium to Blu-ray that gets any kind of home market penetration, though considering the sorry state of America's crumbling infrastructure/broadband capacity maybe it'll wind up that we all just start buying movies on flash memory (NB this is way too expensive)

lol I don't even have Netflix! Not into streaming video because the quality is so shit (in my area at least - Comcast is the only option). But I have Apple Music and I love it, and still buy records.

i've grumbled at flappy before for Big Tech sanguinity but i believe their positions are sincerely-held and non-sock

fortunately everyone will be drownded before the Blurays degrade

I generally hate streaming services of all music/film/TV because they often can't provide what I actually want to watch/hear.

lol wait i think i just got flappy mixed up with flopson again

"the importance and necessity of ownership" pretty sure there's a fugazi song about this

fortunately we have the NY liberries, Brad

anyway libraries are really important imo xp

i only buy important shit like Rossellini and Sternberg boxes

the importance and necessity of ownership

such weird icky ethical bullshit surrounding owning/collecting movies, something almost no one did before the 1980s.

Yeah theres flopson flappy and flopsy

if they could've they would've

xp

flopson, flappy, and floppentail, surely

streaming is generally fine (individual companies maybe not of course) as long as you don't think of it as an archive--it's really just the new iteration of broadcast TV

a key difference though: it's not regulated nearly as much

so nothing good is ever on when you want it to be?
i am not a fan of streaming because you have to purchase access to the service AND have reliable internet in order to use the service. even people in major metropolitan areas don't have access to reliable streaming. AND the catalog is never full of what i want to see so it's just like a crapshoot where all you get is crap...maybe.

that's another reason I can't get on board (yet) - shit disappearing and cycling in and out = DUD

so you need three things -- electricity (fine, we all need this), high speed internet service (not everyone has this) and purchased access to the service providing the media. it relies on three levels of access and even then you have to like what they are serving up. which...when it comes to netflix, no.

i try to avoid owning movies (and books), i have enough

i borrow

xp
yes very good points about worse access than broadcast, I was thinking more just in terms of quality and the arbitrariness of what's discoverable

my students look startled whenever I slip out that I still get Netflix DVDs.

They're doing a project requiring an analysis of M and four other good films made in subsequent decades (most recent: BPM). I sent them to Kanopy because, as I wrote earlier, it's free through the uni library, but I almost listed Filmstruck as an option. With the email volume I get, it was a rare smart move on my part.

the importance and necessity of ownership would make more sense in the context of iTunes purchased movies disappearing when rights change

everytime the viewing medium changes, we lose more films.

i love explaining to students why we are watching a DVD instead of streaming. in addition to the unreliable internet service at my school, usually their favorite reason for doing it is that no one can see you watching a DVD -- like when we watched The Murder of Fred Hampton. they could see the value of privacy.

I've heard great things about Kanopy, don't know about their lousy interface but seems like the best option now.

re:disappearing titles. reminds me a bit of the ebook publishers I deal at work. Even though it's not my money it appalls me that they sell these expensive electronic titles and then drop them from their platform without notice, and you have to figure it out yourself. And then when you complain you just get some tech speak about purging content to upgrade for a better user experience!

my library's Kanopy catalogue is easily fewer than 100 items, and probably 90% are contemporary documentaries

LL: that's genuinely good to hear that your students care about data privacy

everytime the viewing medium changes, we lose more films.

I really wish people understood this, it drives me crazy how cavalier (or just ignorant) people are about it

yeah it's awful. do yall know Rite Aid sells blu rays for like $4 new? not a bad selection tbh

xxp ah didn't know Kanopy's library was regional

Kanopy is good but definitely limited compared to Filmstruck. You can only watch a certain number of things per month, for example.

there's a video store opening up here v soon & the line I've heard the most and the line that KILLS me is "can't you find every movie ever made online?" No!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

the store is also functioning as a physical media archive, registered as a nonprofit, will have a membership model instead of individual rental charges, etc. wish every city could have this - and lord knows it was hard enough here, they've been "coming soon" for months but they've finally painted the storefront & will open next week I think

is that an Alamo thing?

Alamo just took over the library of the last major video store in SF and I'm curious what their going to do with it

nah, co-owned & run by Eric Hatch, I think most of you have seen him on twitter. but here's the facade:

Our facade design is up at @BeyondVideo_!!! So pumped for them to open soon! pic.twitter.com/hvP5t1AeRb

— Post Typography (@posttypography) October 26, 2018

haha that's dope

Alamo recently took over the library of the last major video store in downtown Brooklyn. Haven't gone yet.

there was a small party a couple months ago for people in the film community in town to come check out the store and good lord it's paradise. everyone working there has great taste and are really dedicated to building an archive. whole second floor is directors shelves, so much OOP and hard to find Altman, Godard, Akerman, Denis, Fassbinder, and on and on and on... I haven't even checked out the other rooms yet. so pumped.

anyway, where is Criterion going to go once Filmstruck shutters?

a farm

that Beyond Video building facade looks great!

the selection of films available on Netflix DVD beats any streaming service imo, Kanopy and Filmstruck included

I bailed on Netflix DVD because they skipped too much for me, is this not a problem for you guys?

It has gaps, yeah, but it's still my first choice.

xp
my brother said the same thing about bad netflix discs

the selection of films available on Netflix DVD beats any streaming service imo, Kanopy and Filmstruck included

Currently they offer 63 total films from 1900-1980, and zero of them offer special features, so, no.

on streaming I mean. The discs usually have the features locked.

Currently they offer 63 total films from 1900-1980, and zero of them offer special features, so, no.

― reggae mike love (polyphonic), Friday, October 26, 2018 11:44 AM

then I'm not sure you and I have the same service. I've been working my way through filmographies by director, using the ilx directors poll list as a starting point, to give myself an education, and the number of films available on netflix dvd is astonishing. There are gaps (e.g. the 80s and 90s works of Godard) but for the most part the supply of classic/world stuff is almost endless. I keep a queue of 500 going, and I haven't worked my way even a fraction of it

as I said above though, the search function isn't great, you have to type the film's title in to find most of them

Sorry, I initially missed that you were talking about the DVD service. It's quite comprehensive but I still never use it.

I think you have to be a pretty disciplined viewer to actually remember to update your disc queue, and avoid skipping issues, AND still want to watch the same films from whenever it was that you queued them up. Especially when I can just load up Kanopy (or YouTube) and choose something that fits my mood.

I bailed on Netflix DVD because they skipped too much for me, is this not a problem for you guys?

― 5th Ward Weeaboo (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, October 26, 2018 2:38 PM (forty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It has gaps, yeah, but it's still my first choice.

― You like queer? I like queer. Still like queer. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, October 26, 2018 2:42 PM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean the DVDs skip

Yup, about once every three rentals for me.

More frequently than usual.

Also, perhaps they've closed local receiving plants, for it takes longer for them to process a return. Until a couple years it'd be a 24/48-hour turnaround at most (and I return DVDs at a post office).

Agree about the turnaround, it's worth getting a subscription for at least a few at a time. As far as skipping, it must be partly player-dependent. dvds skip frequently on my friend's player, almost never on mine

lol my friend designed that Beyond Video storefont and just posted it on his fb earlier

👀 small world!

Joanna Scutts: The Death of FilmStruck Is a Dark Day in the History of Movies

When the cultural playing field is restricted to behemoths like Disney and AT&T, there’s less and less chance of anything human-scaled surviving. The indiscriminate sprawl of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon’s vast libraries is part of their allure; you get lost in the figurative stacks, and you can unearth gems and surprises. But for the most part these services are self-reinforcing, telling you what you like based on what you’ve watched before, making inferences about you as a member of a certain demographic. If the only art you see is the kind of art you’ve already heard of, then you’re missing the challenge and the thrill of true discovery.

as the NY public library system is a magnet for the mentally ill, a lot of the discs are quite intentionally scratched up. (i've also twice taken out a Criterion to find some enterprising shitbird has replaced it with a previous iteration of the film.)

While I sense that this meme is meant to make me feel smug about my significant investment in physical media, somehow it is having the opposite effect? pic.twitter.com/jrqhySKJjB

— 𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝕰𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞 𝕯𝖆𝖞 (@NickPinkerton) October 27, 2018

yup.

Kanopy Criterion Collection looks like it is down to about two dozen titles. Okay, sorry, 50.

Okay, warming up to Fandor.

While I sense that this meme is meant to make me feel smug about my significant investment in physical media, somehow it is having the opposite effect? pic.twitter.com/jrqhySKJjB
— 𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝕰𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞 𝕯𝖆𝖞 (@NickPinkerton) October 27, 2018

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Sunday, October 28, 2018 2:44 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you know the guy in that photo has like twelve different limited editions of "boondock saints" in embossed tin cases.

things to watch before Filmstruck disappears: the short nature films of Jean Painlevé. They're like 6-15 min long, span the 1920s (sea urchins, among others) to 1980s (pigeons iirc), have super sweet titles like Shrimp Stories, and are completely delightful.

i guess i should buy a copy of sans soleil if it's that important to me, but it was kinda nice having a streaming service where i could put it on whenever

oh also there is a really cool one about crystals! i am glad to have the chance to watch them before they are absorbed back into the earth or wherever nature films go to rest

I only recently learned this was going away. I would've loved to have taken advantage while it existed but, as far as I could tell, there was no convenient way for me to watch Filmstruck stuff on my actual TV. Which was a pretty serious demerit.

Things like the death of Filmstruck quell my occasional doubts re: the wisdom/sanity of having a 1000+ physical film collection. Relying on digital services is like doing all of your shopping at TJ Maxx, just kinda shrugging your shoulders and taking whatever happens to be on offer that day. There's only so much unpredictability and ephemerality I can come to terms with in this fragile world, knowhutimsayin.

Unsubstantiated gossip from the Criterion Forum message board --

Also, thought I'd add a bit of info that I found out from a friend who works in thebTurner building in Atlanta (they work for primarily with TCM, but also assisted FilmStruck at times).

I asked them when the employees working there found out about the shutdown, because it seemed to come out of nowhere — no rumors or anything. They told me that everyone was notified at work about one-hour before the customer announcement e-mails got sent out that Friday... Yikes :(

Edit: Sent my friend the Bill Hader clip and we talked more. They said that Scorsese apparently tried calling AT&T executives about it (keyphrase: "tried calling"), and other networks are currently offering to purchase the service. So that's hopeful news.

Also, FS already tried merging with Amazon (I assumed as a Prime Channel), but Amazon only wanted them to put up a bulk batch of films — no curation, weekly themes, or supplements/FS extras — so the deal didn't happen.

there was no convenient way for me to watch Filmstruck stuff on my actual TV

the roku app's been around for a while. i guess that requires buying a roku

I wonder if the ATT/Warner/TCM mega service coming next year might try to do a new Criterion deal -- cancel Filmstruck, make Criterion flail for a while, then re-sign them at better-for-ATT terms.

LL, I agree, those Painlevé films are great. A couple of "RIP Filmstruck" articles have mentioned Lubitsch's Cluny Brown and the fact that it's not available in any physical format so I watched it last night and it is terrific.

the short nature films of Jean Painlevé.

I just bought the Criterion DVD collection of these this weekend! I admit I am like the streaming skeptic big guy with the wall of discs upthread. Although I have zero copies of Boondock Saints and three different editions of the Wicker Man.

<3 my friend

maybe i should buy the dvd too. speaking of antiquated nature films, when will criterion discover ken middleham?! i want to see his stuff collected ASAP, before the filmstrips deteriorate!

Hm. Looking through Kanopy I see a bunch of good stuff that comes via the Cohen Collection as well, which collection I had been unaware of

Here we go

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6044-new-independent-criterion-channel-to-launch-spring-2019

https://www.criterion.com/channel

The best news and the scariest news at once.

Well, trying to sign up as a charter member didn't go well, and doesn't bode well.

Huh. Went easy for me, then again I might have snuck in before the crush.

Worked for me. It'd be nice to think they got such a deluge of signups it broke the site for a few minutes.

This is a little worrisome, though:

Our library will also be available through WarnerMedia’s new consumer platform when it launches late next year, so once both services are live, Criterion fans will have even more ways to find the films they love.

After the Warner site launches, will people leave the CChannel to maximize their dollar? Presumably the CChannel will be the only place to get supplements and curated programming and the Bordwell/Thompson/Smith stuff, but will that be enough? The exclusive content will have to be very enticing.

Guess we'll have to see. Unless Warner offers a full streaming TCM at last, can't say I'm immediately interested in what they have to offer.

Yay!

https://trueclassics.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/strangers-on-a-train-bruno.png

forgot to add
Criss Cross

are they still gonna be on kanopy

I wasn't a Filmstruck subscriber but reading about it in the wake of the cancellation announcement made me want to sign up. Glad they're continuing this kind of programming.

Signed up!

Me too. This, along with the new video store in town, will keep me very busy in 2019. I do still buy a lot of physical media, but as Morbius said upthread, I've gotta scale it back to the essentials: certain boxes, movies I know I'll watch multiple times, will go thru the supplements and essays. Does Filmstruck provide any of the essays/liner notes for the CC films they put up?

No, but aren't the essays usually available on the product pages at the Criterion website?

The liners for Bad Timing are not here: https://www.criterion.com/films/744-bad-timing

Not sure about more recent releases/movies that have been upgraded. I just wanted to read the booklet again because I lent out my copy of Bad Timing and like always have had a very hard time getting it back!

The Painleve shorts were a big discovery for me as well. “Daphnia“ was my favorite of those, the microscopic views functioned almost as hyonoticslly beautiful abstract imagery.

Didn’t dig the Farewell Video that much

The liners for Bad Timing are not here: https://www.criterion.com/films/744-bad-timing

yeah they are https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/385-bad-timing-the-men-who-didn-t-know-something

it is missing the garfunkel interview though

right

It’s still there.

Time of death, 8:12 a.m. I was about 15 minutes into The Awful Truth.

:( I watched a few minutes of Still Walking to see if I could just now, must have stopped right before they pulled the plug

Gonna miss this. Went out with an accidental double feature of The Last Seduction and Body Heat (both first time--had no idea it was basically the same movie!) last night.

Only signed up very recently, maybe two months ago (I suppose I could look up thread but tl;dr!) and never got fully into the swing of watching things from beginning to end although I did revisit the beginnings of many old favorites. The last thing I watched to completion, on Wednesday, was Naked for some reason.

And today I heard somebody accidentally quote the security guard from that so I guess it was worth it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XDmasbARtE

Without the beginning cut off
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXgpoLhEBa0

Prior version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJfP6G0LSEA

We got kanopy like a month after we subscribe to filmstruck. There are some hoops to jump through for the former though. I think you can only watch 10 movies a month, and you have to watch them within 3 days.

i took at look at this via one of my (MANY) university employers' library websites, maybe the local public library too, and was discouraged, but going in straight through the kanopy site i was delighted to find that it offered to find my university and offered an immediate authentication using my university login. so, that was cool.

can't find anything definite about a watch limit, maybe i don't have one.