Review coming.
Arts & Faith Lists:
2020 Top 100 — #77
Between 1955 and 1991, Indian director Satyajit Ray made more than thirty feature films, but he’s best remembered in the West for the “Apu trilogy,” which launched his career. Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), and Apur Sansar (1959) are based on the novels of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhya and follow their hero, Apu, from his impoverished childhood in a small Bengali village through…
From the first Arts & Faith Top 100 list in 2004, voters have wrestled with and disputed the meaning of “Spiritually Significant.” When discussing what makes a film spiritually significant, seemingly the only constant has been that it means something other that craftsmanship or artistry. Sight & Sound’s critics’ survey of the Top 100 Films of all…
“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…
A romantic triangle is one of the most common storylines in film. The characters are usually pretty well defined: a well meaning guy with a raging libido, a gorgeous woman with loose morals, and a sweet sensible girl pining for a husband. And of course, there is sex. But what if a film replaces this…
“Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper. The storm clouds did not release a ‘gentle rain from heaven,’ but a whirlwind, which has not yet spent its force or attained its full momentum.” – Martin Luther King, Jr. Selma, Alabama, March 1965 was part of the…
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…