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    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…

  • Cave of Forgotten Dreams

    On a Top 100 list that threatens top-heaviness with clergy, saints, and organized religion, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a welcome outlier.  Its writer/director, Werner Herzog, professes no interest in God or religion, except as a subject for cultural exploration, a manifestation of our humanity. Yet his films, across a career spanning almost 60 years, are suffused with…

  • Schindler’s List

    Provoking intense responses both from admirers and detractors, Schindler’s List is the story of a Nazi, Oskar Schindler, who saved more than 1,000 Jews from death. The relationship of mutual gratitude between Schindler and the people he saves is the irreducible element that sets Schindler’s List apart from other chronicles of the Holocaust. Schindler saves the Jews…

  • The Music Room

    Appreciation coming.  Directed by: Satyajit Ray Produced by: Satyajit Ray Written by: Tarashankar Banerjee Satyajit Ray Santi P. Choudhury Music by: Ustad Vilayat Khan Robin Majumdar Cinematography by: Subrata Mitra Editing by: Dulal Dutta Release Date: 1958 Running Time: 95 Language: Bengali, English Arts & Faith Lists: 2020 Top 100 — #50

  • Selma

    “Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper. The storm clouds did not release a ‘gentle rain from heaven,’ but a whirlwind, which has not yet spent its force or attained its full momentum.” – Martin Luther King, Jr. Selma, Alabama, March 1965 was part of the…

  • 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

    In a key scene of Romanian writer–director Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, Gabita Dragut (Laura Vasiliu) and her college roommate and friend Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) agree never again to discuss the horrific events of that day. To draw a shroud of silence over certain overwhelming experiences is a natural impulse. We avert our eyes, like urban pedestrians…