Review coming.
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #98
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…
The more particular you make your story, the more universal it becomes, or so they say. And Norman Jewison’s adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof (1971), one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history, is certainly a case in point. On the surface, it is a story about a poor Jewish milkman living in Tsarist Russia in…
A melting pot of social, racial and biological interactions, with injustice and violence and voyeurism thrown into the mix, Code Unknown is a film about owning up to the mystery of human relationships—how we stumble to connect through the maze of our own expressions. The film’s continual emphasis on cameras, and on the deaf and their sign…
Simon Kessler is a psychologist high up in the human resources department of the Paris branch of the German company chemical company SC Farb. Kessler’s boss gives him what must be an intimidating job, though he never shows any hesitation. He needs to investigate the company’s CEO, who has been acting irregularly, deteriorating quickly from…
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is a film set in two worlds, but one that takes place entirely on Earth. The first act of Stalker shows us an unnamed, dilapidated city shot in washed-out sepia tones so murky and muted it is difficult to imagine anything surviving there. In this city lives the Stalker, a man called to guide people into…
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…