Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker), winner of the Grand Prix at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. The 237-minute masterpiece, loosely inspired by a story by Honoré de Balzac, follows the painter Édouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli), who lives with his wife, Liz (Jane Birkin), in a Provençal château. He is inspired to come out of retirement to paint Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart), the striking girlfriend of a young visiting artist. The film’s main themes? Art, sweltering summer, aging, and the body—most notably Béart’s, which is fully nude for much of the movie’s nearly four hours. Named by Akira Kurosawa as one of his favorite films of all time, La Belle Noiseuse—every frame of which is arrestingly beautiful—is a deeply resonant gem of hypnotic, sensual moviemaking. —Spike Carter