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Rainer Werner Fassbinder died as he lived: at many frames per second. The cinephile’s errand of trying to watch everything the German filmmaker made in his lifetime, from all 10 hours of “Berlin Alexanderplatz” to more modestly scaled melodramas like “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” often feels like an act of running in place. Reports of his “contradictory” and “complex” nature reveal what we already know: He was a self-medicating, workaholic perfectionist who drove himself into the ground, completing more than 40 films in his short life, and died because of it. He also did not believe in love, or so say his latest collaborators in absentia, director François Ozon and Fassbinder’s longtime muse Hanna Schygulla.

Ozon has made his best film in years with “Peter von Kant,” one that will be seen by few but relished by all who do. The movie is both a response to...

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Courtesy of Janus Film.On the occasion of a comprehensive retrospective the Tiff Bell Lightbox (October 28 - December 23), the need to summarize the thirty plus films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder seems not just daunting, but reductive. How to simplify someone who both evolved and contradicted himself? While typically turning out three films per year between 1966 and his death in 1982, the year 1974 seems like one of the German director’s most unified, at least in terms of one preoccupation: marriage. This particular year seems as possibly a mid-way between Fassbinder’s working out-the-kinks genre exercises (The American Soldier, Love Is Colder Than Death) and the later, lavish international co-productions based on esteemed literary works (Despair, Querelle). The diversity upon which the holy union is depicted can be detected if just judging by each of the three’s own source material; Ali: Fear Eats the Soul a...

It’s no real secret that we’re reaching a tipping point with home video. Streaming is proving a better and better option for the casual consumer every day, and even the cinephile dollar, which has rather successfully driven home video decisions for the past couple of years, has such services as Hulu, Fandor, Mubi, and – soon – FilmStruck vying for their attention. Physical distributors have subsequently doubled down on their most successful and acclaimed models. Criterion is going big on new-to-disc, big international titles with new restorations (Brighter Summer Day, Paris Belongs to Us, A Touch of Zen) and lavish new editions of American classics (The New World, Dr. Strangelove). Kino is investing in silent classics (Fantomas, The Phantom of the Opera, Diary of a Lost Girl) while diversifying to include more American studio titles. Masters of Cinema is going into deep specialty stuff with an Early Murnau box and Edvard Munch.

In this episode of Off The Shelf, Ryan and Brian take a look at the new DVD and Blu-ray releases for Tuesday, April 12th 2016.

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Follow-Up Star Wars: Rogue One trailer / Rebels News Arrow Video: The Swinging Cheerleaders, Crimes of Passion, Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection, + Blood and Black Lace (Us only) & Satan’s Blade (UK Only). Arrow Academy: Effi Briest, Fox and His Friends, The Ox-Bow Incident Criterion: McCabe & Mrs. Miller Kino Lorber: One Million Years B.C., Cry of the City Shout Factory: Death Wish II (w/ Unrated cut) Twilight Time: July & August Line-up and Sale Mill Creek: 2 William Castle Double Features Universal: Black Dog Links to Amazon A Prayer for the Dying Bride of Re-Animator Chato’s Land Cutter’s Way Destroyer / Edge of Sanity Heroes Reborn: Event Series In the French Style It Follows Julia Justice League...

Donald Trump vs. Starbucks' War on Christmas. The War on Christmas: The movies that come to mind We're still in November, but the War on Christmas – according to online buzz, a second cousin once removed of the War on Cops – has begun. Weeping and gritting of teeth has seized certain population segments in the U.S.A. (and perhaps other countries as well) after Fox News, that beacon of intellectual freedom at the end of the cable news tunnel, announced that … Starbucks' holiday season cups are a) red b) devoid of Christmas decorations. Could it be a satanic conspiracy disguised as politically correct inclusiveness? The result of a communist takeover at the Seattle-headquartered company? Cruel and unusual Christian persecution in the form of paper cups? Your guess is as good as mine. Far-right Republican icon, U.S. presidential candidate, and 2015 political circus ringmaster Donald Trump seems to think that Starbucks...

Each week, the fine folks at Fandor add a number of films to their Criterion Picks area, which will then be available to subscribers for the following twelve days. This week, the Criterion Picks focus on eight films from Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Fall in love with a giant of New German Cinema with a selection of curated highlights from the prolific yet truncated career of iconoclast director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Don’t have a Fandor subscription? They offer a free trial membership.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 All That Heaven Allows. A lonely widow meets a much younger Arab worker in a bar during a rainstorm. They fall in love, to their own surprise, and to the outright shock of their families, colleagues, and drinking buddies. In Ali: Fear Eats The Soul,...

All week long our writers will debate: Which was the greatest film year of the past half century.  Click here for a complete list of our essays. I was one of the first to select years for this particular exercise, which probably allowed me to select the correct year. The answer is, of course, 1974 and all other answers are wrong. No matter what your criteria happens to be, 1974 is going to come out on top. Again, this is not ambiguous or open to debate. We have to start, of course, with the best of the best. "Chinatown" is one of the greatest movies ever made. You can't structure a thriller better than Robert Towne and Roman Polanski do, nor shoot a Los Angeles movie better than John Alonzo has done. Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway give the best performances of their careers, which is no small achievement. If you ask...

Stroszek

Written an directed by Werner Herzog

Germany, 1977

You really can’t go wrong with any of the 16 titles included in Herzog: The Collection, the recently released limited edition Blu-ray set. This stunning compendium features several of the incomparable Werner Herzog’s finest fiction and documentary films (including many that fall somewhere between those categories), most available for the first time on Blu-ray. Though the strongest cases could be made for Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, it would be difficult to necessarily pick the “best” film included here, but one movie that has always stood out as being among Herzog’s most unusual is Stroszek, from 1977. Well received upon its release, and now recognized as one of the German filmmaker’s finest films, Stroszek is something of an enigma in Herzog’s career full of enigmatic works.

The picture follows three Berliners as they flee their homeland for...

Riffing on Terek Puckett’s terrific list of director/actor collaborations, I wanted to look at some of those equally impressive leading ladies who served as muses for their directors. I strived to look for collaborations that may not have been as obviously canonical, but whose effects on cinema were no less compelling. Categorizing a film’s lead is potentially tricky, but one of the criteria I always use is Anthony Hopkins’s performance in Silence of the Lambs, a film in which he is considered a lead but appears only briefly; his character is an integral part of the story.

The criteria for this article is as follows: The director & actor team must have worked together at least 3 times with the actor in a major role in each feature film, resulting in a minimum of 2 must-see films.

One of the primary trends for the frequency of collaboration is the...

When you're watching a film on your computer, does the idea of commenting on it in real time appeal to you? What if you could create an original live blog of your favorite new releases, which all your friends could see, comment on, repost, reblog or retweet?

More and more studios are hopping aboard social film streaming on Facebook, and they're really hoping you will, too.

On Tuesday, Lionsgate became the first studio to release a film on the social networking site in tandem with its DVD and Blu-ray release. "Abduction," an action film starring Taylor Lautner that was poorly received by critics and flopped at the box office during its theatrical run, can now be rented on Facebook for $3.99; the loan lasts for two days. The film's Facebook page also posted a message alerting fans that they could could unlock an exclusive interview with Lautner if they answered a trivia question.

Updated through 4/16.

"There are movies that make news and movies that are news," begins J Hoberman in the Voice. "World on a Wire is one of the latter. Suddenly: a virtually unknown, newly restored, two-part tele-film directed by long-gone wunderkind Rw Fassbinder at the height of his powers.... Fassbinder made World on a Wire immediately after his art-film breakthrough, Effi Briest, and, abetted by many of his regular actors, the 27-year-old filmmaker seemed eager to re-establish his punk bona fides. As wildly ambitious as it is cinephilic, World on a Wire mixes the pop art effrontery of Godard's Alphaville with the cyber-phobic metaphysics of Kubrick's 2001 (to name the two movies most bluntly referenced) while remaining wholly Fassbinderian in its insolently lugubrious ironies."...

Michael Haneke's Palme D'or winner offers a spellbinding tale of bigotry and brutality in a pre-Great War rural German community, says Philip French

Numerous novelists, dramatists and film-makers have been attracted to the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War to give their work a touch of nostalgia, irony or historical resonance.

Jb Priestley, whose life had been transformed by his experiences on the Western Front, was among the earliest with his 1934 play Eden End, set in 1912 Yorkshire. Isabel Colegate's novel The Shooting Party (filmed by Alan Bridges in 1984) takes place at a grand country house in 1913. István Szabó's movie Colonel Redl cuts straight from its eponymous antihero's death to the Austro-Hungarian army going into battle, though it was as early as 1916 that the Austrian wit Karl Kraus launched one of the last century's greatest cliches by having a newsboy enter a Viennese cafe shouting: "Extra!

Joining the long list of horror-screening events taking place in October to celebrate Halloween, Manhattan’s 92YTribeca (200 Hudson Street) is presenting a Fright Fest running the entire month. Among the highlights is the New York premiere of Justin Johnson, Aaron Marshall and Erik Mauck’s documentary Zombie Girl (pictured), and a series of Takashi Miike films.

Co-presented here by UnionDocs, Zombie Girl follows 12-year-old Texan Emily Hagins as she sets out to shoot the undead feature Pathogen. Winner of the Spirit Award at this year’s Slamdance Film Festival, the movie will be shown at 92YTribeca this Friday, Oct. 2 at 8 p.m. You can see Zombie Girl’s official website here, its Facebook page here and its MySpace page here.

The rest of the Fright Fest lineup is as follows:

Saturday, Oct. 3 and Friday, Oct. 9 at 10 p.m.: Miike’s The Happiness Of The Katakuris

Wednesday, Oct. 7 at 8 p.

Berlin – "John Rabe," an historic biopic about the German business man who saved 200,000 Chinese civilians from the Nanking massacre, is the front runner for this year's German Film Awards – or Lolas – with seven nominations.

The film's nominations include best film, best director for Florian Gallenberger and a best actor for star Ulrich Tukur as Rabe.

Steve Buscemi also picked up a nomination as best supporting actor for his role as an idealistic American doctor who helps Rabe. It was one of the few Lola nominations ever given to a non-German actor.

Uli Edel's Golden Globe and Oscar-nominated terrorist drama "The Baader Meinhof Complex" picked up four Lola noms, including best film and best actress for Johanna Wokalek.

"Chiko," a gangster movie by first time director Ozgur Yildirim, surprised many by also nabbing a best film nom along with ones for Yildirim's screenplay, for lead actor Denis Moschitto and for editor Sebastian Thumler.

Berlin -- Richard Loncraine's "My One and Only," a '50s-era comedy starring Renee Zellweger and Kevin Bacon, was squeezed into the competition lineup for this year's Berlin International Film Festival, barely a week before the event kicks off.

Zellweger plays a glamorous single mom on the hunt for a rich man to foot the bill for her and her sons' lifestyle. Produced by Merv Griffith Entertainment and Ray Gun Prods., "My One and Only" will have its world premiere in Berlin. Essential Entertainment is handling international sales.

Berlin also added Lone Scherfig's Sundance favorite "An Education" with Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina and Emma Thompson and Davis Guggenheim's music documentary "It Might Get Loud" for its Berlinale Special Galas, ensuring the films will get the red carpet treatment without any of the pressure of competition.

All three films should give an added boost of star power to...