Timbuktu

Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert film, Stop Making Sense, begins simple enough. Talking Heads front man David Byrne walks onto a bare stage and places a boombox on the ground. “Hi, I got a tape I wanna play you,” he quips. Byrne turns on the stereo and the musician’s acoustic guitar soon melds to a tight backing…

Spirited Away, perhaps Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki’s greatest work of art, is the beautiful and engrossing tale of a young girl, Chihiro, who enters a magical world through an abandoned amusement park. Of course, such a summary necessarily fails to do justice to the grand imagination on display in the film. The comparisons to Alice…

Kon Ichikawa’s deeply humane, spiritually resonant masterpiece is routinely but reductionistically described as “pacifist” or “anti-war.” War, though, is the occasion for the central theme, not the theme itself, which is nothing less than the intractable mystery of suffering and evil, affirmation of spiritual values, and the challenge to live humanely in evil circumstances. Adapted…

As we discuss what makes a film spiritually significant, the concepts of truth and beauty are often at the center of our conversations. Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion is not just a film that presents truth and beauty; it is about truth and beauty. The film appears to argue that truth is absolute but so complex that it…

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…

After four consecutive “masterpieces,” what did the Dardenne brothers do? Make another movie every bit as good as those. Like La Promesse, Rosetta, and The Son, The Child (L’Enfant) is a subtle parable about tests of conscience and character in a punishing world. We’re introduced to Bruno (the extraordinary Jérémie Renier). He’s young, but he’s already a hardened criminal….