Appreciation coming.
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #60
Set on the border between Mexico and America, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil tells the tale of a murder investigation that pits two determined men against one another: Miguel Vargas, an official in the Mexican government, and Hank Quinlan, an American police captain. Vargas is an articulate, young, handsome, wealthy, educated, straight-shooter with a bright…
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…
What is the relationship between military duty and human emotion? Clare Denis explores this dichotomy in her film Beau Travail, an adaption of the Herman Melville’s novel Billy Budd transported to post-colonial Africa. Beau Travail tells the story of Galoup, an officer leading a troop of the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti, East Africa. He is a career military…
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…
A Catholic pilgrimage underscored by a Lutheran chorale, a nun abandoning her duties to have an affair, a skeptic receiving a miraculous cure ahead of more devout pilgrims. A cliché I can’t stand says “God moves in mysterious ways,” and while it is possible to take that away from Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes, I think what’s more…
In The Phantom Carriage, director Victor Sjöström plays David Holm, a heartless unrepentant rascal who receives two summons one New Year’s midnight. The first is from a dying nun who showed him the most undeserved act of mercy he ever received; the second is from the phantom who drives Death’s titular carriage. As the film shows…