• Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

    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 him by his nickname as is customary among Thai people)…

  • Nazarin

    Review coming.  Directed by: Luis Buñuel Produced by: Federico Amérigo Manuel Barbachano Ponce Written by: Julio Alejandro Luis Buñuel Benito Pérez Galdós Emilio Carballido Music by: Rodolfo Halffter Cinematography by: Gabriel Figueroa Editing by: Carlos Savage Release Date: 1959 Running Time: 94 Language: Spanish Arts & Faith Lists: 2005 Top 100 — #47 2006 Top…

  • Still Life

    Still Life is director Jia Zhangke’s meditation on the effects—personal, societal, and environmental—that occur during the building of the magnificent Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River in central China. As the dam moves closer to completion, authorities hold back more and more water, meaning that low-lying communities close to the dam will soon be underwater….

  • Places in the Heart

    Places in the Heart (1984), written and directed by Robert Benton, won two Academy Awards—Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress for Sally Field. The film also received nominations for Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress (Lindsay Crouse), Best Supporting Actor (John Malkovich), and Best Costume Design. Considering the flashy blockbusters that often win big prizes…

  • Timbuktu

    Review coming. Directed by: Abderrahmane Sissako Produced by: Rémi Burah Etienne Comar Sylvie Pialat Olivier Père Benoît Quainon Gilles Sitbon Written by:Abderrahmane Sissako Kessen Tall Music by: Amin Bouhafa Cinematography by: Sofian El Fani Editing by: Nadia Ben Rachid Release Date: 2014 Running Time: 96 Language: French, Arabic, English Arts & Faith Lists: 2020 Top…

  • The Red Shoes

    The most famous line in The Red Shoes is probably an early exchange between Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) and Victoria Page (Moira Shearer). The director of a prestigious ballet company asks the aspiring ballerina why she wants to dance. Her reply: “Why do you want to live?” The answer impresses Lermontov enough to earn her a small…

  • Selma

    “Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper. The storm clouds did not release a ‘gentle rain from heaven,’ but a whirlwind, which has not yet spent its force or attained its full momentum.” – Martin Luther King, Jr. Selma, Alabama, March 1965 was part of the…