— Review Coming
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #73
In approximately a decade’s time, if not slightly longer, Nicholas Ray directed a corpus of artistically successful films comparable to William Wyler’s run of exceptional movies in the 1940s and 1950s, to Yasujiro Ozu’s mature work from 1949 to 1962, and to Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematic experiments in the 1960s. Like Godard (who was deeply influenced…
If, as they say, writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then how does one describe a film like Koyaanisqatsi (1983), which has no actors, no dialogue, and no plot, but consists instead of nothing but music and images (some of which, incidentally, do happen to revolve around architecture)? Well, we can begin by looking at…
A romantic triangle is one of the most common storylines in film. The characters are usually pretty well defined: a well meaning guy with a raging libido, a gorgeous woman with loose morals, and a sweet sensible girl pining for a husband. And of course, there is sex. But what if a film replaces this…
The great and final act of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s remarkable career was the production of a trilogy called Three Colors—Blue, White, and Red—that represents the colors of the French flag, and the values they represent: liberty, equality and fraternity. Filmed in three countries (France, Poland, Switzerland), their plots overlap only slightly. Watch closely, and you’ll see the different…
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…
“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…