Timbuktu

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…

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…

Chariots of Fire, based on the story of British Olympians Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1981. The film stretches the boundaries of both the biopic and sports genres as it presents a series of vignettes from the lives of these two athletes in the years and months…

Fritz Lang and Peter Lorre accomplish a remarkable feat in M (1931). They humanize child murderer Hans Beckert. Suspenseful, drenched in tragedy, M brings the audience through Beckert’s harrowing final days as he evades both police and the criminal underground. Beckert’s frantic efforts to escape the tightening noose echo his attempts to overcome his compulsion. A scratched and worn…

The third feature by Colombian director Ciro Guerra, Embrace of the Serpent calls to mind Roland Joffe’s The Mission, with its story of colonial exploitation of South American tribes.  Its brink of insanity, hallucinatory vividness is reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God. But Embrace of the Serpent is marvelous on its own terms.  Loosely inspired by the journals…

Appreciation coming.  Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard Produced by: Alain Sarde Ruth Waldburger Written by: Jean-Luc Godard Music by: Cinematography by: Julien Hirsch Christophe Pollock Editing by: Raphaele Urtin Release Date: 2001 Running Time: 97 Language: French Arts & Faith Lists: 2010 Top 100 — #94 2020 Top 100 — #69