Appreciation coming.
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #48
L’Avventura (1960) has long been known as the first feature in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “alienation” trilogy, which includes La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962). Yet the term “alienation” is too simple and too succinct a descriptor; this film is about emotional, social, and spiritual enervation, about something nightmarish. The inhabitants of Antonioni’s post-industrial, post-war West are profoundly sick, dysfunctional, wayward, and…
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…
Still Life is director Jia Zhangke’s meditation on the effects—personal, societal, and environmental—that occur during the building of the magnificent Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River in central China. As the dam moves closer to completion, authorities hold back more and more water, meaning that low-lying communities close to the dam will soon be underwater….
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…
After four consecutive “masterpieces,” what did the Dardenne brothers do? Make another movie every bit as good as those. Like La Promesse, Rosetta, and The Son, The Child (L’Enfant) is a subtle parable about tests of conscience and character in a punishing world. We’re introduced to Bruno (the extraordinary Jérémie Renier). He’s young, but he’s already a hardened criminal….
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…