Witness

Drawing upon a semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, Isao Takahata’s animated masterwork Grave of the Fireflies tells the story of two orphans caught in the middle of the firebombing that decimated the cities of Japan in the final months of World War Two. Seita is in many ways an ideal big brother, adoring and protecting his…

In approximately a decade’s time, if not slightly longer, Nicholas Ray directed a corpus of artistically successful films comparable to William Wyler’s run of exceptional movies in the 1940s and 1950s, to Yasujiro Ozu’s mature work from 1949 to 1962, and to Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematic experiments in the 1960s. Like Godard (who was deeply influenced…

Between 1955 and 1991, Indian director Satyajit Ray made more than thirty feature films, but he’s best remembered in the West for the “Apu trilogy,” which launched his career. Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), and Apur Sansar (1959) are based on the novels of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhya and follow their hero, Apu, from his impoverished childhood in a small Bengali village through…

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…

Director Frank Borzage first transports us to a dark, ugly, seedy world of poverty and inequality in Paris. The pre-code masterpiece deals with the later-taboo topics of abuse, prostitution and atheism. The Hayes’ Code was designed to present and protect “moral decency” on film. But by showing some of the realities of life that the…