Originally a five-hour miniseries, Bergman’s episodic film gives us Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullman), a successful middle-class couple who find themselves torn between irreconcilable differences and habitual affection. Scenes is spare, unadorned, and unflinching in its depiction of the small jealousies and unspoken resentments which Read More …
In a series of stories separated by the seasons themselves, Another Year follows Tom and Gerri Hepple (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), a happily married couple, as they work in their garden and in the lives of those nearby. Exploring what it means to be a married Read More …
On the face of it, Jim Sheridan’s semi-autobiographical tale of an Irish family settling in Hell’s Kitchen would seem a shamelessly sentimental tearjerker featuring adorable children and a lovable, dying black man. But the film transcends such a description with its unconventional directing, enchanting cinematography, Read More …
Caring husband Nick (Peter Falk) works around the clock at his construction job to provide for his family, but the crescendo of his wife Mabel’s (Gena Rowlands) mental instability begins to threaten their children, frighten the neighbors, and jeopardize their marriage. A harrowing yet poignant Read More …
Emotionally involving, intelligent, and psychologically complex, A Separation is a persuasive portrait of flawed but sympathetic people trapped in such familiar patterns of conflict that they might be our own family or neighbors, despite religious and cultural differences. Set in Tehran, Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning drama is spurred Read More …
From time to time in Friendly Persuasion we see a needlepoint that says, “God is love,” always in the background and near the center of the frame. It echoes the sentiment’s valued place in the marriage of Jess and Eliza Birdwell (Gary Cooper and Dorothy McGuire), a Quaker Read More …
It’s one thing to save yourself for marriage, but what if you and your partner still don’t have any sex after the wedding? That is the question explored by this poignant, funny, bittersweet look at newlywed woes in 1960s Britain starring a grown-up Hayley Mills, but what Read More …
In the second Rossellini/Bergman collaboration on this list, a WWII refugee (Ingrid Bergman) breaks free from an internment camp by marrying a young Italian fisherman (Mario Vitale), but finds herself trapped as soon as they return to his ancestral home—a Sicilian island that hosts a Read More …
In this film, which many would call Yasujiro Ozu’s masterpiece, an elderly couple (Chishû Ryû and Chieko Higashiyama) visit their adult children in Tokyo, only to find that time and change have altered the way generations treat each other, and their future together becomes uncertain. Read More …
Philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote of marriage as the lowest state to which a Christian can descend, but Jean-Louis, the Jesuitical bachelor protagonist of this fourth installment of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, strongly objects. “Pascal’s Wager,” he says, is a calculated utilitarian exchange, inapplicable to the Read More …