Appreciation coming.
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #60
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,…
A sensitive cultural ethnography of the exotic, much-maligned world of Southern Pentecostalism; a complex study of a character whose many contradictions startlingly combine sacred and profane dimensions; a spiritual exploration of the inscrutable workings of guilt and grace: The Apostle—long labored over by writer, director, producer, and star Robert Duvall—is all of these. Duvall’s film contemplates…
John Ford’s 1956 Western, The Searchers, ends with the camera framing a doorway, looking out into the gloriously filmed desert. As his remaining friends and family cross over the threshold into the welcoming house, John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards stays outside, watching them. Then he pauses a moment, turns, and walks off into the red dust. There’s…
Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957) transcends the well-worn cliche of the golden-hearted prostitute. The film stars Fellini’s wife and constant collaborator, Giuletta Masina, as a woman named Maria Ceccarelli but known to everyone in her social strata as Cabiria. Cabiria was pushed into prostitution by her destitute mother when she was young and beautiful, and her…
This classic, brilliantly colorful film from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger follows five nuns, led by Sister Clodagh, into the Himalayas to start a hospital and school for the local villagers. The battle against the elements and the local culture proves to be a formidable one, though Sister Clodagh’s most difficult tasks comes from within—through…
It’s tricky to review The Son without raising viewers’ expectations. To rave about the film’s artistry might create a certain anticipation of being dazzled. But, “the truth must dazzle gradually,” and The Son — like all of the Dardenne Brothers’ films — is the antithesis of what most moviegoers consider “entertainment.” It is, rather, a story that unfolds without…