Review coming.
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #32
Simon Kessler is a psychologist high up in the human resources department of the Paris branch of the German company chemical company SC Farb. Kessler’s boss gives him what must be an intimidating job, though he never shows any hesitation. He needs to investigate the company’s CEO, who has been acting irregularly, deteriorating quickly from…
The more particular you make your story, the more universal it becomes, or so they say. And Norman Jewison’s adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof (1971), one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history, is certainly a case in point. On the surface, it is a story about a poor Jewish milkman living in Tsarist Russia in…
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s celebrated feature-length debut is a story about two brothers who must decide whether to trust the stranger who suddenly arrives in their home claiming to be their father. As the sons argue about how to respond, they follow this stranger out on what they believe will be a fishing trip. It becomes something…
The Mission confronts us with deeply spiritual questions: · What are we to make of the fact that the European missionaries often served as the vanguard of colonialism yet also became the staunchest defenders of the colonized against colonial plunder and oppression? · To what extent will or should conversion to Christianity change a person, or a whole…
If, as they say, writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then how does one describe a film like Koyaanisqatsi (1983), which has no actors, no dialogue, and no plot, but consists instead of nothing but music and images (some of which, incidentally, do happen to revolve around architecture)? Well, we can begin by looking at…
In his 14th full-length film, I Am Not Your Negro, Haitian-born director Raoul Peck achieved perfection with a masterful blending of a screenplay by writer and activist James Baldwin, footage old and new, and an eclectic soundtrack that underscores his film’s ideas and contentions. As a cinematic essay, it is an intellectual and emotional argument so persuasive, it…