Streaming: the best of William Friedkin

A new-to-streaming documentary about the Exorcist director prompts a look through his fascinating back catalogue

For a director who hasn’t made a major film in nearly a decade, William Friedkin is undergoing something of a surprising revival. The 84-year-old American director’s up-and-down career has enjoyed a collective critical appraisal in recent years, while he has been the subject of multiple documentaries: the kind of film-maker-becoming-the-film treatment that few auteurs get once in their careers. One such, admittedly, he made himself. The Devil and Father Amorth (2017), on Netflix, is an indulgent curio that attempts to revive the mythos of Friedkin’s 1973 horror tale of satanic possession, The Exorcist, while Alexandre O Philippe’s still unreleased Leap of Faith takes a longer, more enlightening view on the same film.

YouTube yields Off Season, his strikingly cruel, hard-boiled contribution to The Alfred Hitchcock Hour series

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