— Review Coming
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #73
The great and final act of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s remarkable career was the production of a trilogy called Three Colors—Blue, White, and Red—that represents the colors of the French flag, and the values they represent: liberty, equality and fraternity. Filmed in three countries (France, Poland, Switzerland), their plots overlap only slightly. Watch closely, and you’ll see the different…
Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert film, Stop Making Sense, begins simple enough. Talking Heads front man David Byrne walks onto a bare stage and places a boombox on the ground. “Hi, I got a tape I wanna play you,” he quips. Byrne turns on the stereo and the musician’s acoustic guitar soon melds to a tight backing…
In her essay “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson,” Susan Sontag argues that “All of Bresson’s films have a common theme: the meaning of confinement and liberty.” A Man Escaped develops this theme more explicitly than in any other of his works, making it the best entry point into Bresson’s oeuvre. The film details the…
Taking shelter from a torrential rainstorm in a demon-haunted temple, two men struggle to comprehend the story of a murder. They have witnessed crimes before, but something about this one has left them shell-shocked. One of them laments, “This time, I may finally lose my faith in the human soul.” What follows in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon is…
In 1974, Mohsen Makhmalbaf stabbed a young police officer while attempting to steal his gun. Makhmalbaf was only seventeen at the time but had already been actively involved for a number of years in organized resistance to the Shah’s government. He served four-and-a-half years of his sentence before being released in 1979, soon after the…
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…