— Review Coming
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #73
Few political issues reveal the divisions among people who claim to be religious or spiritual more than does the death penalty. Like Dead Man Walking, the other great death penalty film on this list, At the Death House Door, argues passionately that the death penalty traumatizes those who are called to enact it. Like soldiers drafted into…
Before he became an Oscar-winning filmmaker, Denys Arcand was an historian. And some of his first historical projects—such as a government-sponsored documentary about Samuel de Champlain, one of the founding fathers of Canada—got him into trouble with the powers that be, who felt he didn’t toe the official line as closely as he should have. …
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…
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…
A useful starting point when approaching Friedrich Wilhelm (F. W.) Murnau’s Faust is Rembrandt’s 1652 etching of the same name. In it, we see Faust alone in his library, poring through parchments, surrounded on all sides by scientific paraphernalia. But Rembrandt pays little attention to the things in the room and, instead, directs our focus toward Faust’s desperate…
Appreciation coming. Directed by: William Wyler Produced by: Samuel GoldwynLester Koenig Written by: Robert E. SherwoodMacKinlay Kantor Music by: Hugo Friedhofer Cinematography by: Greg Toland Editing by: Daniel Mandell Release Date: 1946 Running Time: 170 Language: English Arts & Faith Lists: 2020 Top 100 — #48