Monsieur Vincent

Review coming.  Directed by: Ming-liang Tsai Produced by: Laurence Picollec Chinlin Hsieh Bruno Pesery Written by: Ming-liang Tsai Pi-ying Yang Music by: Cinematography by: Benoît Delhomme Editing by: Sheng-Chang Chen Release Date: 2001 Running Time: 116 Language: Mandarin, French, Min Nan, English Arts & Faith Lists: 2020 Top 100 — #98

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…

Victoire Thivisol was four years old when she played Ponette, a girl struggling to understand her mother’s death in a car accident. The range and depth of emotion she displays makes me a little worried about what director Jacques Doillon did to coax the performance out of her. Thivisol became the youngest actress to win…

Appreciation coming.  Directed by: Tim Robbins Produced by: Jon Kilik Tim Robbins Rudd Simmons Written by: Helen Prejean Tim Robbins Music by: David Robbins Cinematography by: Roger Deakins Editing by: Lisa Zeno Churgin Ray Hubley Release Date: 1995 Running Time: 122 Language: English Arts & Faith Lists: 2005 Top 100 — #15 2006 Top 100…

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…

We must decide to be human. In the People’s Square, before a great crowd of witnesses and in representing them, we must make the decision to be wholly human. Wim Wenders’ wonderful and dreamlike 1987 fantasy, Der Himmel über Berlin, portrays two angels observing the people of a divided Berlin.   As the camera floats freely…