Appreciation coming.
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #67
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…
A stuttering student is hypnotized to cure his impediment. A strong wind blows across a field. A ceiling collapses in a rainshower. A bird lands on a boy’s head. A sleeping woman levitates over her bed. A man clutches some feathers in his hand, and a bird flies out. It is difficult to imagine…
Kon Ichikawa’s deeply humane, spiritually resonant masterpiece is routinely but reductionistically described as “pacifist” or “anti-war.” War, though, is the occasion for the central theme, not the theme itself, which is nothing less than the intractable mystery of suffering and evil, affirmation of spiritual values, and the challenge to live humanely in evil circumstances. Adapted…
Steely with conviction, luminous with wisdom and wit, Fred Zinnemann’s impeccable film of Robert Bolt’s play about the life of Thomas More explores what defines a man, or what is left to a man who has no defining center that cannot be bought or coerced. Successful, urbane, gregarious, ridiculously talented and accomplished, Thomas More was the…
What is the relationship between military duty and human emotion? Clare Denis explores this dichotomy in her film Beau Travail, an adaption of the Herman Melville’s novel Billy Budd transported to post-colonial Africa. Beau Travail tells the story of Galoup, an officer leading a troop of the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti, East Africa. He is a career military…
In The Phantom Carriage, director Victor Sjöström plays David Holm, a heartless unrepentant rascal who receives two summons one New Year’s midnight. The first is from a dying nun who showed him the most undeserved act of mercy he ever received; the second is from the phantom who drives Death’s titular carriage. As the film shows…