Nazarin

In a nod to the social realism of American cinema in the late silent era, The Immigrant is an operatic take on a city full of charlatans, pimps, and immigrants. Its citizens are larger than life and drawn as broadly as a sepia photograph in fading newsprint. But like Bruno and Ewa, they are carving out a…

Few political issues reveal the divisions among people who claim to be religious or spiritual more than does the death penalty.  Like Dead Man Walking, the other great death penalty film on this list, At the Death House Door, argues passionately that the death penalty traumatizes those who are called to enact it. Like soldiers drafted into…

In Close-Up, Abbas Kiarostami retells the true story of the trial of Hossein Sabzian who fraudulently convinced a family that he was the famous film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The entire incident comes about in a seemingly innocent way; however, the moral struggle surrounding the deception involves a complex wrestling with themes of identity, belonging, forgiveness and repentance.  Sabzian is arrested, imprisoned,…

“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…

What is the relationship between military duty and human emotion? Clare Denis explores this dichotomy in her film Beau Travail, an adaption of the Herman Melville’s novel Billy Budd transported to post-colonial Africa.  Beau Travail tells the story of Galoup, an officer leading a troop of the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti, East Africa. He is a career military…

Rick Deckard: She’s a replicant, isn’t she?Dr. Eldon Tyrell: I’m impressed. How many questions does it usually take to spot one?Deckard: I don’t get it, Tyrell.Tyrell: How many questions?Deckard: Thirty, forty, cross-referenced.Tyrell: It took more than a hundred for Rachael, didn’t it?Deckard: She doesn’t know.Tyrell: She’s beginning to suspect, I think.Deckard: Suspect? How can it…