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With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Blow Out (Brian De Palma)

In a career fixated on the machinations of filmmaking presented through both a carnal and political eye, Brian De Palma’s fascinations converged idyllically with Blow Out. In his ode to the conceit of Blow Up — Michelangelo Antonioni’s deeply influential English-language debut, released 15 years prior — as well as the aural intrigue of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, De Palma constructs a conspiracy...

Although François Truffaut has written that the New Wave began “thanks to Jacquette Rivette,” the films of this masterful French director are not well known. Rivette, like his “Cahiers du Cinéma” colleagues Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer, did graduate to filmmaking but, like Rohmer, was something of a late bloomer as a director.

In 1969, he directed the 4-hour L’amour fou (1969), the now legendary 13-hour Out 1 (1971) (made for French TV in 1970 but never broadcast; edited to a 4-hour feature and retitled Out 1: Spectre (1972)), and the 3-hour Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), his most entertaining and widely seen picture. In these three films, Rivette began to construct what has come to be called his “House of Fiction”–an enigmatic filmmaking style involving improvisation, ellipsis and considerable narrative experimentation.

Celine and Julie Go Boating

In 1975, Jacques Rivette reunited with Out 1 producer Stéphane Tchal Gadjieff with the idea of a four-film cycle.

As a supplement to our Recommended Discs weekly feature, Peter Labuza regularly highlights notable recent home-video releases with expanded reviews. See this week’s selections below.

Two playful journeys into women’s lives — one a mystery forged in darkness, one an adventure-turned-ritualistic-requiem. Jacques Rivette’s Duelle and Noroît originally set up a four-part circle of films that were never finished. But these never-released-in-America masterpieces comprise his most wondrous ode to classical Hollywood, each based on a forgotten text. In Rivette’s own obsessive mise-en-scéne, their fantasies are grounded through realism, constructed worlds where the camera simply documents performance.

The streets of Paris remain conspicuously quiet through Duelle, a noir-fantasy modeled off Rko’s The Seventh Victim. The frizzle-haired ingénue Hermine Karagheuz balances on a ball before coming crashing back down, and suddenly a woman gives her the task of finding a missing man (encouraged by the booming sounds of the...

As an supplement to our Recommended Discs weekly feature, Peter Labuza regularly highlights notable recent home video releases with expanded reviews. See this week’s selections below.

The American Friend (Criterion)

“What’s wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?” Wim Wenders’ ode to American crime films of the ’50s remains his most idiosyncratic work, teetering between absurdist comedy and strained psycho-drama. Bruno Ganz stars as an art framer — a metaphor for the impossible boundaries he can no longer contain — tempted by the opportunity of earning money for murder, a profession he has no experience in. It’s hard to know when to take Wenders seriously — Ganz’s trip to Paris begins with a conspiracy-ridden doctor’s visit that sets up the film for more absurdist laughs than a “state of the continent” manifesto (the target is noted as an “American Jew”). But the film’s murder in a Paris metro...

This article accompanies the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s dual retrospective of the films of Jacques Rivette and David Lynch and is part of an ongoing review of Rivette’s films for the Notebook, in light of several major re-releases of his work.Amour fou, in Lynch’s Wild at Heart, Rivette’s L’amour fou, is a pretext for the theatrical. Only in Lynch’s very romantic Palme d’Or winner do the shifts between and coalesces of plastic (the stage) and interior life (the love affair) lead to a union of any kind; when Sailor (Nicolas Cage) mounts the hood of his sweetheart’s Cadillac and serenades her with “Love Me Tender,” the superficiality of the reference to badboy Elvis Presley movies achieves a sort of extradimensional poignancy: the characters live in a plastic world, of Wizard of Oz witches, barroom brawls, lipstick-smeared killer moms, Texas hitmen,...

Actor with a natural and rebellious style, she helped to launch the French New Wave

Bernadette Lafont, who has died aged 74, could have claimed to be the first female star of the Nouvelle Vague. François Truffaut chose the sensual, dark-haired, 18-year-old Lafont and her new husband, Gérard Blain, to play lovers in the director's first professional film, Les Mistons (The Mischief-Makers, 1957). In this charming short, shot in Nîmes one summer, a group of pubescent boys spy on Lafont and Blain's lovemaking in the fields. Blain and Lafont were also picked to appear in arguably the first French New Wave feature, Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958). In this film, about a young man returning to his childhood home, Lafont played the "village vamp".

Lafont's fresh look and performance style crystallised the movement's ideological and cinematic ambitions. Truffaut and his colleagues found mainstream stars inadequate to their needs, using instead unknown and non-professional actors,...

Argentinian director whose films drew heavily on the stories of Jorge Luis Borges

Although the Argentinian director and screenwriter Eduardo de Gregorio, who has died aged 70, had lived in Paris since 1970, his work was always identifiably South American. This can be attributed to the overpowering influence of the labyrinthine stories of Jorge Luis Borges on a generation of South American artists.

De Gregorio brought this Borgesian aura to bear on the five features he directed, and on the screenplays he wrote with Jacques Rivette and Bernardo Bertolucci. In fact, for the latter's The Spider's Stratagem (1970), De Gregorio adapted the Borges story Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, smoothly transposing it from Ireland to Italy. It was an elaborate piece of Oedipal plotting in which, revisiting the village in the Po valley where his father was murdered in 1936, a young man discovers that his father was not a hero, but a traitor.

News.

Above: Harris Savides. Photo by Brigette Lancombe for Interview magazine.

We were saddened and shocked to hear of the passing of one of film's great cinematographers, Harris Savides. Our brief note includes an indelible clip from Gerry, one of his collaborations with Gus Van Sant. David Hudson has rounded up commentary at Fandor.

One of Savides' chief collaborators, director David Fincher, is also in the news with an animated film project that's appealing to Kickstarter to get funded.

Two big trailer debuts have sprung on us over the last week. One's the second trailer for Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained:

...and the other is the first full trailer for Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty:

Filmmaker Jon Jost has started a petition calling for Ray Carney to return underground director Mark Rappaport's film materials. As the petition explains:

"In 2005, when Mark Rappaport moved to France, Ray Carney,...

"No more Lubitsch," said Billy Wilder, at the Great Man's funeral.

"Worse than that," said William Wyler. "No more Lubitsch movies."

The suspicion, amounting almost to a certainty, that Jacques Rivette will make no more feature films to follow the very lovely Around a Small Mountain, can inspire the fan with an irrational, vertiginous fear: no more Rivette movies? But in fact, there are numerous existing Rivette movies still not seen, or not seen in anything like ideal circumstances. The iceberg-tip of his oeuvre that's commercially available is supported by a vast submerged continent of unreleased work. And the films themselves are so rich, so palatial, exploring them would take lifetimes.

Still, if one was looking either for Rivette-related work to supplement his great mad corpus, or something that sheds an interesting sidelight on a major Rivette work, Sérail (a.k.a. Surreal Estate, 1976), by the Argentinian writer-director and...

Avant-garde French cinematographer at the heart of the new wave

For 45 years, the French cinematographer William Lubtchansky, who has died of heart disease aged 72, put his talents at the disposal of the most challenging, intellectually inquiring, uncompromisingly brilliant film directors who emerged with the French new wave. Lubtchansky worked with Jean-Luc Godard (six times), although they fell out, made up and fell out again; the husband and wife team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (11 times); and Jacques Rivette (14 times).

Although these directors differed in their approaches and sensibilities, they were united in their irreverent, generally unsentimental treatment of character, their existential attitude to society and to human behaviour, and their experiments with filmic space and time. They questioned cinema itself by drawing attention to the conventions used in film-making and quoting from the other arts. They presented an alternative to Hollywood by consciously breaking its conventions while at the...