Nazarin

This Israeli-made film, the first collaborative effort between Israel’s religious and secular communities, is a small gem of a film. This film takes us into a world we haven’t seen before on film, inside an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem.  Here a married couple, Moshe and Mali, are preparing for the Jewish harvest holiday of…

When we first see the priest, he is leaning over a grieving woman.  He is reading the Bible to her and praying for her.  He is doing his duty.  Father Barry has just arrived after longshoreman Joey Doyle was pushed to his death from the top of a tall building.  Edie is the woman who is in shreds on…

The shift from Yi Yi to A Brighter Summer Day is one of the more surprising changes to the 2020 version of the Arts & Faith Top 100.  The former was on every previous version of the Arts & Faith list. The latter, initially released in 1991, had not been on any previous version. Given that the 2020 list…

Whirring helicopter blades slowly dissolve into the rotating ceiling fan of Capt. Willard’s Saigon apartment, as he drinks himself into oblivion. Lt. Col. Kilgore blasts Wagner from his infantry helicopters as they decimate a Viet Cong village. The mad genius, Col. Kurtz, sets himself up as a god, deep in the jungles of Cambodia. These…

“This was not just a matter of chance,” the narrator of Magnolia tells us, and so begins an odyssey of coincidence, absurdity, failure, and redemption. A television producer lies dying, his memory failing, crying out for his estranged son. A cable-TV pseudo-celebrity, renowned for his seminars on how to successfully seduce women, finds himself confronted by the…