In Praise of Love

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…

As the sun sets on a chapter of history, a beautiful estate in the countryside outside of Paris becomes the setting for this intricate meditation on art and history: What makes an object valuable? How is globalization changing our values? How is it changing the role of art in culture, the way things are made,…

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s celebrated feature-length debut is a story about two brothers who must decide whether to trust the stranger who suddenly arrives in their home claiming to be their father. As the sons argue about how to respond, they follow this stranger out on what they believe will be a fishing trip. It becomes something…

Whirring helicopter blades slowly dissolve into the rotating ceiling fan of Capt. Willard’s Saigon apartment, as he drinks himself into oblivion. Lt. Col. Kilgore blasts Wagner from his infantry helicopters as they decimate a Viet Cong village. The mad genius, Col. Kurtz, sets himself up as a god, deep in the jungles of Cambodia. These…

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…

Spirited Away, perhaps Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki’s greatest work of art, is the beautiful and engrossing tale of a young girl, Chihiro, who enters a magical world through an abandoned amusement park. Of course, such a summary necessarily fails to do justice to the grand imagination on display in the film. The comparisons to Alice…