To Sleep With Anger

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…

There are few films that fill us with such righteous indignation as Day of Wrath. Featuring empathetic characters caught in a callous system, the film can easily evoke our anger. Religious intolerance and dehumanizing persecution are nothing new, of course, but Day of Wrath reminds us that it has a long history. At the same time, the film…

In a nod to the social realism of American cinema in the late silent era, The Immigrant is an operatic take on a city full of charlatans, pimps, and immigrants. Its citizens are larger than life and drawn as broadly as a sepia photograph in fading newsprint. But like Bruno and Ewa, they are carving out a…

“What is the true meaning of life?” Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski has asked. “Why get up in the morning? Politics doesn’t answer that.” The Decalogue, Kieslowski’s extraordinary, challenging collection of ten one-hour films made for Polish television in the dying days of the Soviet Union, doesn’t answer Kieslowski’s questions either. What it does is pose them…

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…

The third feature by Colombian director Ciro Guerra, Embrace of the Serpent calls to mind Roland Joffe’s The Mission, with its story of colonial exploitation of South American tribes.  Its brink of insanity, hallucinatory vividness is reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God. But Embrace of the Serpent is marvelous on its own terms.  Loosely inspired by the journals…