Appreciation coming.
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #36
John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath opens with a view of the “scarred earth,” then lifts its eyes to consider the scarred people that lived on that earth. It finds these people staggering through the Dust Bowl storms that struck the Southern U.S. in the 1930’s. This early passage from the novel seems to lay bare the…
Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert film, Stop Making Sense, begins simple enough. Talking Heads front man David Byrne walks onto a bare stage and places a boombox on the ground. “Hi, I got a tape I wanna play you,” he quips. Byrne turns on the stereo and the musician’s acoustic guitar soon melds to a tight backing…
The shift from Yi Yi to A Brighter Summer Day is one of the more surprising changes to the 2020 version of the Arts & Faith Top 100. The former was on every previous version of the Arts & Faith list. The latter, initially released in 1991, had not been on any previous version. Given that the 2020 list…
Director Frank Borzage first transports us to a dark, ugly, seedy world of poverty and inequality in Paris. The pre-code masterpiece deals with the later-taboo topics of abuse, prostitution and atheism. The Hayes’ Code was designed to present and protect “moral decency” on film. But by showing some of the realities of life that the…
Steely with conviction, luminous with wisdom and wit, Fred Zinnemann’s impeccable film of Robert Bolt’s play about the life of Thomas More explores what defines a man, or what is left to a man who has no defining center that cannot be bought or coerced. Successful, urbane, gregarious, ridiculously talented and accomplished, Thomas More was the…
Agnès Varda tells as much about her own experiences and feelings growing older as she does about the history and practice of gleaning, an occupation that has itself grown old. By placing herself as the documentary’s ultimate gleaner, she collects wisdom about her subjects, her environment and herself and then shares it with her audience….