‘Chicken for Linda’ (dirs. Sébastien Laudenbach & Chiara Malta, 2023)
The Criterion Channel knows that neo-noir just hits different during the sweltering heat of summer, when murderous temptation and high-key sex jazz seem as if they’re baked into the humidity, and so the streamer has leaned all the way into the July of it all with a genre retrospective that ranges from the horny (‘Out of Sight’) to the insane (‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans’), and from the even hornier (‘The Last Seduction’) to, well, Ken Russell (‘Crimes of Passion’). Of course, when it comes to sun-soaked crimes of passion, it’s hard to do better than Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Romeo + Juliet,’ which is the centerpiece of a Pop Shakespeare series that spans from Derek Jarman’s 1979 ‘The Tempest’ to Michael Almereyda’s “Hamlet” and beyond (by ‘beyond,’ I mean Joss Whedon’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’).
Anyone looking for classic dialogue in a different meter would do well to explore the Columbia Screwball series, which boasts a breathless array of genre classics (‘His Girl Friday’) alongside less familiar offerings like Richard Boleslawski’s ‘Theodora Goes Wild,’ in which Irene Dunne plays a provocative writer whose anonymously published novel scandalizes the rest of her conservative Connecticut town. More scandalous — and considerably scuzzier — fun awaits in the Channel’s tribute to Times Square, which naturally starts with ‘Sweet Smell of Success’ before swerving even deeper into the muck with ‘Taxi Driver,’ ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ and Bette Gordon’s ‘Variety.’
The July slate also includes a mini-retro devoted to Nicolas Roeg (including his Donald Sutherland classic ‘Don’t Look Now’), a celebration of Heisei Era Godzilla, and a spotlight on the punk spirit that coursed through Mexican cinema in the late ’80s. And yet, much as I hate to pass up the rare opportunity to highlight older films in this column, my pick of the month is a brand-new animated title that’s far too special to get lost in the shadow of ‘Inside Out 2’ and ‘Gru 10’ or whatever, especially come awards season. As gorgeously realized as it is deceptively basic, Sébastien Laudenbach and Chiara Malta’s ‘Chicken for Linda’ is the story of an eight-year-old girl named Linda who… wants chicken. For dinner, specifically. But Laudenbach and Malta manage to draw an ocean of feeling from that wisp of an idea, creating a musical delight that exalts in animation’s power to make even the simplest emotions feel as infinite and expressive as our most sacred memories. Don’t miss it.
All films available to stream July 1