Nazarin

In approximately a decade’s time, if not slightly longer, Nicholas Ray directed a corpus of artistically successful films comparable to William Wyler’s run of exceptional movies in the 1940s and 1950s, to Yasujiro Ozu’s mature work from 1949 to 1962, and to Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematic experiments in the 1960s. Like Godard (who was deeply influenced…

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…

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 Christ-like soul sharing in the sufferings of Christ. At the…

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…

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…

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…