Appreciation coming.
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #60
From the first Arts & Faith Top 100 list in 2004, voters have wrestled with and disputed the meaning of “Spiritually Significant.” When discussing what makes a film spiritually significant, seemingly the only constant has been that it means something other that craftsmanship or artistry. Sight & Sound’s critics’ survey of the Top 100 Films of all…
Director Frank Borzage first transports us to a dark, ugly, seedy world of poverty and inequality in Paris. The pre-code masterpiece deals with the later-taboo topics of abuse, prostitution and atheism. The Hayes’ Code was designed to present and protect “moral decency” on film. But by showing some of the realities of life that the…
“There are moments when the social world seems more evident in an object or a gesture than in the whole concatenation of our beliefs and institutions.” In this quote, anthropologist David MacDougall encapsulates the ambition of observational cinema with perfect precision. “Through our senses we measure the qualities of our surroundings—the tempo of life, the…
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a slow film about a man fading quietly from this life in a death rite of bureaucratic and cultural ineptitude. But the carelessness that lends Lazarescu its excruciating pace creates a setting for a criticism of the Romanian health care system that transcends its own context. Mr. Lazarescu has had a headache…
Whirring helicopter blades slowly dissolve into the rotating ceiling fan of Capt. Willard’s Saigon apartment, as he drinks himself into oblivion. Lt. Col. Kilgore blasts Wagner from his infantry helicopters as they decimate a Viet Cong village. The mad genius, Col. Kurtz, sets himself up as a god, deep in the jungles of Cambodia. These…
This Israeli-made film, the first collaborative effort between Israel’s religious and secular communities, is a small gem of a film. This film takes us into a world we haven’t seen before on film, inside an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem. Here a married couple, Moshe and Mali, are preparing for the Jewish harvest holiday of…