John Ford’s 1956 Western, The Searchers, ends with the camera framing a doorway, looking out into the gloriously filmed desert. As his remaining friends and family cross over the threshold into the welcoming house, John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards stays outside, watching them. Then he pauses a Read More …
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 Read More …
The great and final act of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s remarkable career was the production of a trilogy called Three Colors—Blue, White, and Red—that represents the colors of the French flag, and the values they represent: liberty, equality and fraternity. Filmed in three countries (France, Poland, Switzerland), their plots Read More …
A stuttering student is hypnotized to cure his impediment. A strong wind blows across a field. A ceiling collapses in a rainshower. A bird lands on a boy’s head. A sleeping woman levitates over her bed. A man clutches some feathers in his hand, and Read More …
It’s tricky to review The Son without raising viewers’ expectations. To rave about the film’s artistry might create a certain anticipation of being dazzled. But, “the truth must dazzle gradually,” and The Son — like all of the Dardenne Brothers’ films — is the antithesis of what most moviegoers Read More …
With a rigorous style that is often off-putting to newcomers, Bresson eschews the usual emotional cues we’ve become conditioned to expect at the movies. His editing is, above all, efficient—refusing to emphasize one moment over another. We’re forced to pay fierce attention and draw our Read More …
“What is the true meaning of life?” Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski has asked. “Why get up in the morning? Politics doesn’t answer that.” The Decalogue, Kieslowski’s extraordinary, challenging collection of ten one-hour films made for Polish television in the dying days of the Soviet Union, doesn’t Read More …
To witness The Passion of Joan of Arc is to glimpse the soul of a saint in her hour of trial. The film is more than a dramatization, more than a biopic, more than a documentary: It is a spiritual portrait, almost a mystical portrait, of a Read More …
From the start of his feature debut, 2000’s shaggy-dog tale documentary, Mysterious Object at Noon, where the truck-mounted loudspeaker advertisement urges the public to use a particular brand of incense “whenever you want to worship the Buddha…”, the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (or Joe, to call Read More …
“I feel like it should mean nothing or everything,” Travis says of the Christianity that he sees professed by others and lived by Martin, “and I can’t get to either place.” This is Martin Bonner is the rare recent film where Christian characters talk like Read More …