The Best Years of Our Lives

Hirokazu Koreeda is a director seemingly preoccupied with death: his films Maborosi, Hana, and Still Walking all focus on characters dealing with the death of a loved one. After Life is also concerned with death, but Koreeda approaches his subject from a different angle in this film. Whereas his other films showed what happens to the living after someone they know…

We’ve seen some powerful, horrifying films about the war in Rwanda. But we’ve never seen anything like this—a film made with the help of Rwandans, informed by their own experiences, and performed in their own language. Sangwa’s a prodigal son of the Hutu. He’s come back to the family farm after three years in the…

This Israeli-made film, the first collaborative effort between Israel’s religious and secular communities, is a small gem of a film. This film takes us into a world we haven’t seen before on film, inside an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem.  Here a married couple, Moshe and Mali, are preparing for the Jewish harvest holiday of…

When we first see the priest, he is leaning over a grieving woman.  He is reading the Bible to her and praying for her.  He is doing his duty.  Father Barry has just arrived after longshoreman Joey Doyle was pushed to his death from the top of a tall building.  Edie is the woman who is in shreds on…

John Ford’s 1956 Western, The Searchers, ends with the camera framing a doorway, looking out into the gloriously filmed desert. As his remaining friends and family cross over the threshold into the welcoming house, John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards stays outside, watching them. Then he pauses a moment, turns, and walks off into the red dust. There’s…

This beautifully animated short film begins before World War I in the deserted and desertified foothills of the Alps in southern France, where the narrator, on a hiking excursion, meets the peasant Elzéard Bouffier. Having lost his family, Bouffier has decided to dedicate the rest of his life to reforesting the region, one acorn at…