— 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…
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…
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. …
In Close-Up, Abbas Kiarostami retells the true story of the trial of Hossein Sabzian who fraudulently convinced a family that he was the famous film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The entire incident comes about in a seemingly innocent way; however, the moral struggle surrounding the deception involves a complex wrestling with themes of identity, belonging, forgiveness and repentance. Sabzian is arrested, imprisoned,…
Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert film, Stop Making Sense, begins simple enough. Talking Heads front man David Byrne walks onto a bare stage and places a boombox on the ground. “Hi, I got a tape I wanna play you,” he quips. Byrne turns on the stereo and the musician’s acoustic guitar soon melds to a tight backing…
In a key scene of Romanian writer–director Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, Gabita Dragut (Laura Vasiliu) and her college roommate and friend Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) agree never again to discuss the horrific events of that day. To draw a shroud of silence over certain overwhelming experiences is a natural impulse. We avert our eyes, like urban pedestrians…