What’s Happening on Hulu

Artists have long been fruitful subjects for cinema, and this week, we’re turning our gaze to the canvases of their lives in our free festival on Hulu. From a black-and-white portrait of a fifteen^th-century Russian icon artist to a Technicolor British comedy about a deadbeat painter, this week’s selection includes: Alexander Korda’s Rembrandt, Maurice Tourneur’s La main du diable, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Utamaro and His Five Women, Keisuke Kinoshita’s The Portrait, Ronald Neame’s The Horse’s Mouth, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, and Orson Welles’s F for Fake.

And as the long weekend rolls in, we suggest taking some time to enjoy the 1966 five-part anthology film Pearls of the Deep. A defining work of the Czech New Wave, the film’s vignettes were directed by alumni of FAMU (the national film school in Prague): Jiří Menzel, Věra Chytilová, Jaromil Jireš, Jan Němec, and Evald Schorm. The five visionary and experimental works of this omnibus all pay homage to the short stories of Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal; and one of them (Evald Schorm’s contribution) tells the story of an outsider artist, who is played by the man who inspired Hrabal’s character. “Mysterious yet inviting, alternately impenetrable and folksy, the films of Pearls of the Deep constitute a record of a one-of-a-kind creative flowering that remains among film history’s most remarkable chapters,” writes Michael Koresky in his essay for the Eclipse series containing the film, “a standout even amid all the post-Stalin renaissances in East-Central European countries.” You can watch the film for free below or over at Hulu—and remember, if you subscribe to Hulu for just $7.99 a month, you can see more than 900 Criterion films commercial-free, anytime.

from The Criterion Current http://ift.tt/1Uiyppi