Appreciation coming.
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #67
Based on the eponymous historical novel by Jewish author Franz Werfel, Henry King’s beautifully made film stands head and shoulders over most religiously themed fare from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Werfel learned the story of Bernadette Soubirous—an illiterate teenager who in 1858 claimed to see visions of a beautiful lady who was later identified as the…
Most family epics are downers, tragedies, stories of something organic that slowly unravels. But Yi Yi—Edward Yang’s painstakingly observant film about a couple of weeks in the life of a Taiwanese family—is a vast tapestry of discouragement, questioning, realization, and hope. Has there ever been a family epic that offered a richer tapestry of trouble and…
Until very late in Yasujiro Ozu’s film Tokyo Story, there is no crisis more dramatic than some uncomfortable silences. So what is it that makes this film one of the most revered dramas ever crafted? It’s the simplest of stories: An elderly couple—Shukichi and Tomi—drop in on their adult children in Tokyo, only to find that…
“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…
A Catholic pilgrimage underscored by a Lutheran chorale, a nun abandoning her duties to have an affair, a skeptic receiving a miraculous cure ahead of more devout pilgrims. A cliché I can’t stand says “God moves in mysterious ways,” and while it is possible to take that away from Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes, I think what’s more…
Provoking intense responses both from admirers and detractors, Schindler’s List is the story of a Nazi, Oskar Schindler, who saved more than 1,000 Jews from death. The relationship of mutual gratitude between Schindler and the people he saves is the irreducible element that sets Schindler’s List apart from other chronicles of the Holocaust. Schindler saves the Jews…