In case you haven’t seen this yet …

Thanks to Europa Film Trea­sures, you can spend hours look­ing back through an archive of Euro­pean film. The­ses films range from “com­e­dy to sci­ence fic­tion, from west­erns to ani­ma­tion, from erot­ic to eth­no­log­i­cal movies.” And all films come with a fair amount of back­ground infor­ma­tion. And yes, of course, you can stream these films online and watch them in the com­fort of your own home.

For a taste of what this archive is all about, watch Jön az öcsém, a 1919 film by Michael Cur­tiz, who lat­er went on to direct Casablan­ca! For more, enter the gen­er­al col­lec­tion here.

via Boing Boing

Over at The New York Times, film crit­ic A.O. Scott revis­its John Ford’s 1940 film based on John Stein­beck­’s clas­sic nov­el about the Great Depres­sion. Putting fore­clo­sures and eco­nom­ic strain front and cen­ter, it’s sud­den­ly a film for our age.  Scot­t’s video seg­ment runs about three min­utes, fea­tures footage from the film itself, and takes a look at Hen­ry Fon­da’s lead­ing role. Have a look.

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Imag­ine The God­fa­ther with­out Mar­lin Bran­do and Al Paci­no. Blas­phe­my! Well, it almost turned out that way. You can watch more here about how Bran­do almost nev­er made it. Below, we also have a clip that takes you through how Paci­no near­ly missed out on his career-defin­ing role. It includes orig­i­nal footage from his script read­ing ses­sions, and we’ve added it to our YouTube playlist.

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Now show­ing in the YouTube Screen­ing Room: “Peter and Ben is a touch­ing and quirky sto­ry of how two “black-sheep” form an unusu­al and endur­ing bond.” The 10-minute short film was named Best Doc­u­men­tary at the Aspen Shorts Fest 2008. It’s added to our YouTube playlist. Here it goes:

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