A beautiful filmic palindrome, Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” is a richly humanistic film, even as its premise is about encountering extraterritorial life. The film opens and closes with a memory, albeit our understanding of the memory and its Read More …
Call it a Chestertonian fairy tale. This film explores a “soul sick” man’s growing awareness of the fact that he is no longer interested in his own self, but in other people and other things around him instead. This realization is then lit like a match when he takes Read More …
Directed by: Michael Mann Produced by: Pieter Jan Brugge Michael Mann Written by: Marie Brenner Eric Roth Michael Mann Music by: Pieter Bourke Lisa Gerrard Cinematography by: Dante Spinotti Editing by: William Goldenberg David Rosenbloom Paul Rubell Release Date: 1999 Running Time: 157 Language: English Read More …
The theme of waking up plays out on multiple levels in the gorgeously animated The Secret of Kells from filmmakers Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey. Young Brendan awakens to the world outside the walls of the Abbey of Kells where he lives with his uncle, the Abbott. Read More …
The Assassin is a difficult film to summarize, but not because the plot is unclear. Characters constantly fill each other in on where exactly they stand. Roughly, the movie concerns an assassin (Shu Qi) who, having failed in an assignment, is sent to kill her cousin, Read More …
Margaret’s salvation comes through a synchronicity of awakenings: The moment her husband’s disordered priorities are exposed, with painful consequences. The moment her friendships are revealed as relationships of convenience, enabling lives of self-centeredness and denial. The moment she participates in workplace corruption. She begins to Read More …
Shakespeare’s ‘foolish, fond old man’ of ‘fourscore and upwards’ is a cultural archetype, illustrating, among other things, one of our greatest fears about growing older. First Lear loses his wits and then he loses everything else. What makes this production so special is not just Read More …
James Ivory immediately sets the tone for his film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day. In late 1950’s England, Stevens (Anthony Hopkins), head butler of over 30 years for the once thriving Darlington Hall, wanders down or peers into hallways that are Read More …
Do we really believe that wisdom, joy, peace, and courage are the fruit of old age? We may know it from saints or from special people in our own lives, but we probably don’t know it from the movies. Here, then, is our antidote to Read More …
Growing older, in many ways, is a slow and steady reckoning with one’s own mortality. For silent film star of yesteryear Norma Desmond, (Gloria Swanson) growing older is a continual process of denial. The reality that she will not perpetually be twenty-five is a horror Read More …