Dead Man Walking

Review coming. Directed by: Charles Burnett Produced by: Thomas S. Byrnes Caldecot Chubb Michael Flynn Danny Glover Linda Koulisis Edward R. Pressman Darin Scott Ron Stacker Thompson Harris Tulchin Written by: Charles Burnett Music by: Stephen James Taylor Cinematography by: Walt Lloyd Editing by: Nancy Richardson Release Date: 1990 Running Time: 102 Language: English Arts…

Before he became an Oscar-winning filmmaker, Denys Arcand was an historian. And some of his first historical projects—such as a government-sponsored documentary about Samuel de Champlain, one of the founding fathers of Canada—got him into trouble with the powers that be, who felt he didn’t toe the official line as closely as he should have. …

Kon Ichikawa’s deeply humane, spiritually resonant masterpiece is routinely but reductionistically described as “pacifist” or “anti-war.” War, though, is the occasion for the central theme, not the theme itself, which is nothing less than the intractable mystery of suffering and evil, affirmation of spiritual values, and the challenge to live humanely in evil circumstances. Adapted…

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a slow film about a man fading quietly from this life in a death rite of bureaucratic and cultural ineptitude. But the carelessness that lends Lazarescu its excruciating pace creates a setting for a criticism of the Romanian health care system that transcends its own context. Mr. Lazarescu has had a headache…

A sensitive cultural ethnography of the exotic, much-maligned world of Southern Pentecostalism; a complex study of a character whose many contradictions startlingly combine sacred and profane dimensions; a spiritual exploration of the inscrutable workings of guilt and grace: The Apostle—long labored over by writer, director, producer, and star Robert Duvall—is all of these.   Duvall’s film contemplates…

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…