Appreciation coming.
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #36
Woody Allen got his start lampooning the deadly serious foreign films that were all the rage in the 1960s and 1970s. Then the former stand-up comic began to emulate (some might say imitate) those films as he turned out dramas like Interiors and September. Along the way, he left a trail of theological breadcrumbs in comedies like The Purple…
Before he became an Oscar-winning filmmaker, Denys Arcand was an historian. And some of his first historical projects—such as a government-sponsored documentary about Samuel de Champlain, one of the founding fathers of Canada—got him into trouble with the powers that be, who felt he didn’t toe the official line as closely as he should have. …
Rick Deckard: She’s a replicant, isn’t she?Dr. Eldon Tyrell: I’m impressed. How many questions does it usually take to spot one?Deckard: I don’t get it, Tyrell.Tyrell: How many questions?Deckard: Thirty, forty, cross-referenced.Tyrell: It took more than a hundred for Rachael, didn’t it?Deckard: She doesn’t know.Tyrell: She’s beginning to suspect, I think.Deckard: Suspect? How can it…
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…
Agnès Varda tells as much about her own experiences and feelings growing older as she does about the history and practice of gleaning, an occupation that has itself grown old. By placing herself as the documentary’s ultimate gleaner, she collects wisdom about her subjects, her environment and herself and then shares it with her audience….
The Mission confronts us with deeply spiritual questions: · What are we to make of the fact that the European missionaries often served as the vanguard of colonialism yet also became the staunchest defenders of the colonized against colonial plunder and oppression? · To what extent will or should conversion to Christianity change a person, or a whole…