As I hope you already know, The Auteurs periodically posts a collection of films that can be watched for free at the click of your mouse. For free. Online. Click of a mouse. These aren’t always descriptors that tend to be connected to things of great quality. But in this case, they are. Somehow The Auteurs (may God bless them richly) work out all the distribution issues and make it easy for us to catch some of the finest films cinema history has to offer.
This most recent offering, thanks also to Criterion, is a set of First Films:
Whereas some filmmakers cut their teeth on works they might rather forget, the artists whose films we’re presenting in this month’s festival burst out of the gate with panache. Marco Bellocchio, Jane Campion, Samuel Fuller, Roman Polanski, Lynne Ramsay, Agnès Varda—all of their debut features are elegant, fully formed expressions of their creators’ artistic and emotional worldviews, audacious, auspicious films like Fists in the Pocket and Sweetie.
Varda’s La pointe-court, Ramsay’s Ratcatcher, Fuller’s I Shot Jesse James.
What on earth did we do before The Auteurs?