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    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…

  • Faust

    A useful starting point when approaching Friedrich Wilhelm (F. W.) Murnau’s Faust is Rembrandt’s 1652 etching of the same name. In it, we see Faust alone in his library, poring through parchments, surrounded on all sides by scientific paraphernalia. But Rembrandt pays little attention to the things in the room and, instead, directs our focus toward Faust’s desperate…

  • Paths of Glory

    Classifying Paths of Glory as an anti-war film is the result of lazy thinking. Shot in simple black-and-white in 1957, this is the film that put director Stanley Kubrick on the map, and there’s a very good reason why. While loosely based on a true story referred to as the “Corporals of Souain” during World War I…

  • How Green Was My Valley

    Despite its reputation as the picture that undeservedly beat Citizen Kane for Best Picture and Director Academy Awards, How Green Was My ValleyM remains a stirring and vital portrait of a close-knit community in all its glory—and all its failings. Seen through the eyes of a boy approaching manhood, it’s the chronicle of a quaint Welsh community and one…

  • The Mill and the Cross

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  • Yi Yi

    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…