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SPOTLIGHT's Film Curation Archives

Spotlight: Actors: Jane Birkin

In homage to actor and style icon Jane Birkin, this week we present a selection of films both featuring her and about her, as befits someone whose personal life and career had such an impact on French culture in the 1960s and beyond.

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Spotlight: Directors: Bergman!

In the history of cinema, few filmmakers cast a shadow as immense as Ingmar Bergman, whose brilliant body of work tackled both personal demons and broader questions about the human condition with a fearless and fascinating hunger. In honor of Bergman's birthday this week, here are twelve films we consider must-sees from the Swedish filmmaker.

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Spotlight: Directors: Pedro Almodóvar!

Pedro Almodóvar launched a one-man revolution in Spanish cinema when he began his career nearly half a century ago, with an aesthetic, a sensibility, and a genre-bending approach to narrative all his own. After a long and prolific career (still going strong), he has a prodigious body of work, but here are some of our favorites.

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Spotlight: Pride 2023

At a time when LGBT rights are under particular threat around the world, the assertion of our diversity and our common humanity becomes all the more important. In that spirit, we offer a selection of queer stories about soccer, dance, mental illness, war, refugees, anti-colonialist hackers, secrets, grief -- and, of course, love.

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Spotlight: French Films at Cannes (the Competition)

Anatomy of a Fall, by French director Justine Triet, won the Palme d'Or at the recent 76th Cannes Film Festival. This week we look back at the other French films that have won the top prize since the Festival began.

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Spotlight: Hitchcock Outside Hollywood

Though many of Alfred Hitchcock's most famous films were created only after he transferred to Hollywood in 1939, it was while still living in England that the London-born director first began honing the style and techniques that distinguish him as a filmmaker. We've rounded up twelve films from Hitchcock's early days and periodic returns home so you can see the great director's British filmography for yourself.

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Spotlight: Mothers and Mother's Day

This week we present films that explore motherhood, prospective and actual, from a variety of perspectives and in contexts ranging from the legal to the supernatural. These films chart the complex and often determinative ways that mothers shape their children's lives, and conversely, that children shape the lives of their mothers.

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Spotlight: Directors: Satyajit Ray

Widely recognized as one of the best directors of all time, Satyajit Ray directed 36 films for which he received numerous prestigious awards, but our favorite tribute comes from fellow master Akira Kurosawa: “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.”

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Spotlight: Girls Getting Older

This week we're watching films about girls growing up and coming into their own. From sexual awakenings to political rebellions, these films depict girls claiming their independence in a variety of circumstances, and the forces arrayed against them as they do so.

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