— Review Coming
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #73
Taking shelter from a torrential rainstorm in a demon-haunted temple, two men struggle to comprehend the story of a murder. They have witnessed crimes before, but something about this one has left them shell-shocked. One of them laments, “This time, I may finally lose my faith in the human soul.” What follows in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon is…
Hirokazu Koreeda is a director seemingly preoccupied with death: his films Maborosi, Hana, and Still Walking all focus on characters dealing with the death of a loved one. After Life is also concerned with death, but Koreeda approaches his subject from a different angle in this film. Whereas his other films showed what happens to the living after someone they know…
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…
Eva: “No-one kicks you here, Bruno.” Bruno Stroszek: “Not physically, here they do it spiritually.” Stroszek is a film riddled with misfits. Its title character, the musician Bruno Stroszek, is the quintessential misfit. Director Werner Herzog sets him against characters more comfortable in their social roles and identities. Bruno is an outcast wherever he lives,…
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…
In his 14th full-length film, I Am Not Your Negro, Haitian-born director Raoul Peck achieved perfection with a masterful blending of a screenplay by writer and activist James Baldwin, footage old and new, and an eclectic soundtrack that underscores his film’s ideas and contentions. As a cinematic essay, it is an intellectual and emotional argument so persuasive, it…