Appreciation coming.
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #36
“Recently, I’ve had the weirdest dreams,” says the aged physician Isak to his daughter-in-law Marianne. His confession is an understatement. Isak’s dreams create the crises and categories for a film about legacy and death. Beginning with a Dali-esque vision—Gunnar Fischer’s magnificently shot chiaroscuro sequence for people who think David Lynch is too normal—and through flashback…
John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath opens with a view of the “scarred earth,” then lifts its eyes to consider the scarred people that lived on that earth. It finds these people staggering through the Dust Bowl storms that struck the Southern U.S. in the 1930’s. This early passage from the novel seems to lay bare the…
What is the relationship between military duty and human emotion? Clare Denis explores this dichotomy in her film Beau Travail, an adaption of the Herman Melville’s novel Billy Budd transported to post-colonial Africa. Beau Travail tells the story of Galoup, an officer leading a troop of the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti, East Africa. He is a career military…
Provoking intense responses both from admirers and detractors, Schindler’s List is the story of a Nazi, Oskar Schindler, who saved more than 1,000 Jews from death. The relationship of mutual gratitude between Schindler and the people he saves is the irreducible element that sets Schindler’s List apart from other chronicles of the Holocaust. Schindler saves the Jews…
Hirokazu Koreeda is a director seemingly preoccupied with death: his films Maborosi, Hana, and Still Walking all focus on characters dealing with the death of a loved one. After Life is also concerned with death, but Koreeda approaches his subject from a different angle in this film. Whereas his other films showed what happens to the living after someone they know…
— Review Coming Directed by: Joshua Oppenheimer Anonymous Christine Cynn Produced by: Anne Köhncke Signe Byrge Sørensen Michael Uwemedimo Written by: Music by: Cinematography by: Anonymous Carlos Arango de Montis Lars Skree Editing by: Release Date: 2012 Running Time: 117 Language: Indonesian, English Arts & Faith Lists: 2020 Top 100 — #73