Gateway Movies offers ways to begin exploring directors, genres and topics in film by examining a few streaming movies. The German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder died in 1982 at age 37, yet worked at a pace that allowed him to complete more than 40 features. Many of his greatest works, like “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” and “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” test their characters’ capacities for love and cruelty. One fun way in is to stack him against the émigré Hollywood legends he clearly revered — directors like Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder and Josef von Sternberg. Sirk, the master of the self-deconstructing 1950s women’s picture, loomed particularly large as an influence.

Source: New York Times November 05, 2020 18:44 UTC