Timbuktu

We must decide to be human. In the People’s Square, before a great crowd of witnesses and in representing them, we must make the decision to be wholly human. Wim Wenders’ wonderful and dreamlike 1987 fantasy, Der Himmel über Berlin, portrays two angels observing the people of a divided Berlin.   As the camera floats freely…

A Catholic pilgrimage underscored by a Lutheran chorale, a nun abandoning her duties to have an affair, a skeptic receiving a miraculous cure ahead of more devout pilgrims. A cliché I can’t stand says “God moves in mysterious ways,” and while it is possible to take that away from Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes, I think what’s more…

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…

“This was not just a matter of chance,” the narrator of Magnolia tells us, and so begins an odyssey of coincidence, absurdity, failure, and redemption. A television producer lies dying, his memory failing, crying out for his estranged son. A cable-TV pseudo-celebrity, renowned for his seminars on how to successfully seduce women, finds himself confronted by the…

Appreciation coming.  Directed by: William Wyler Produced by: Samuel GoldwynLester Koenig Written by: Robert E. SherwoodMacKinlay Kantor Music by: Hugo Friedhofer Cinematography by: Greg Toland Editing by: Daniel Mandell Release Date: 1946 Running Time: 170 Language: English Arts & Faith Lists: 2020 Top 100 — #48

Most everyone has heard of Bicycle Thieves. Even those who have never heard of neorealism. Even those who might not know the name Vittorio De Sica. It is the original film celebrity — famous for being famous. Woody Allen named it one of his five favorite films. Martin Scorsese introduces it for Turner Classic Movies in…