“You gotta laugh, ain’t ya sweetheart? Else you’d cry.” This observation from working-class Londoner Cynthia Rose Purley (Brenda Blethyn) is a perfect summary of the tone running through Mike Leigh’s Palme d’Or-winning melodramatic masterpiece. A slice-of-life portrayal of broken individuals navigating the complexity of their familial ties, Secrets & Lies perfectly captures the quiet intensity of ordinary suffering. Both comic…
We’ve seen some powerful, horrifying films about the war in Rwanda. But we’ve never seen anything like this—a film made with the help of Rwandans, informed by their own experiences, and performed in their own language. Sangwa’s a prodigal son of the Hutu. He’s come back to the family farm after three years in 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…
John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath opens with a view of the “scarred earth,” then lifts its eyes to consider the scarred people that lived on that earth. It finds these people staggering through the Dust Bowl storms that struck the Southern U.S. in the 1930’s. This early passage from the novel seems to lay bare the…
Most everyone has heard of Bicycle Thieves. Even those who have never heard of neorealism. Even those who might not know the name Vittorio De Sica. It is the original film celebrity — famous for being famous. Woody Allen named it one of his five favorite films. Martin Scorsese introduces it for Turner Classic Movies in…
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…
Appreciation coming. Directed by: Ermanno Olmi Produced by: Written by: Ermanno Olmi Music by: Cinematography by: Ermanno Olmi Editing by: Ermanno Olmi Release Date: 1978 Running Time: 196 Language: Italian Arts & Faith Lists: 2020 Top 100 — #36
A sensitive cultural ethnography of the exotic, much-maligned world of Southern Pentecostalism; a complex study of a character whose many contradictions startlingly combine sacred and profane dimensions; a spiritual exploration of the inscrutable workings of guilt and grace: The Apostle—long labored over by writer, director, producer, and star Robert Duvall—is all of these. Duvall’s film contemplates…
Spirited Away, perhaps Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki’s greatest work of art, is the beautiful and engrossing tale of a young girl, Chihiro, who enters a magical world through an abandoned amusement park. Of course, such a summary necessarily fails to do justice to the grand imagination on display in the film. The comparisons to Alice…
Agnès Varda tells as much about her own experiences and feelings growing older as she does about the history and practice of gleaning, an occupation that has itself grown old. By placing herself as the documentary’s ultimate gleaner, she collects wisdom about her subjects, her environment and herself and then shares it with her audience….