All the Screen’s a Stage

The intersection of cinema and the performing arts has been a source of inspiration for many of the world’s greatest auteurs. Over on the Criterion Channel, we’re raising the curtain on our latest series, All the Screen’s a Stage, which gathers seven masterpieces that highlight the complex ways in which the two mediums echo each other. Included in the lineup are such classics as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, a dazzling tale of a ballerina torn between professional ambition and romantic love; Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide, an erotically charged adaptation of a Japanese puppet play; and Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise, a poetic realist epic that programmer Michael Sragow discusses in the below video as cinema’s first great portait of the tragedies and triumphs of theater life.