A Serious Man

This beautifully animated short film begins before World War I in the deserted and desertified foothills of the Alps in southern France, where the narrator, on a hiking excursion, meets the peasant Elzéard Bouffier. Having lost his family, Bouffier has decided to dedicate the rest of his life to reforesting the region, one acorn at…

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…

Whirring helicopter blades slowly dissolve into the rotating ceiling fan of Capt. Willard’s Saigon apartment, as he drinks himself into oblivion. Lt. Col. Kilgore blasts Wagner from his infantry helicopters as they decimate a Viet Cong village. The mad genius, Col. Kurtz, sets himself up as a god, deep in the jungles of Cambodia. These…

This classic, brilliantly colorful film from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger follows five nuns, led by Sister Clodagh, into the Himalayas to start a hospital and school for the local villagers. The battle against the elements and the local culture proves to be a formidable one, though Sister Clodagh’s most difficult tasks comes from within—through…

Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) has been wandering in the desert for some four years at the beginning of Paris, Texas, and it shows. His suit is so begrimed with dust that it’s hard to tell what color it originally was, and in his eyes is the look of a man who does not know where…

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…