Witness

There is a moment in The Work when a man utters a sound that I’ve never heard emerge from another human being. It is a cry of both anguish and relief, as if a levee has broken after a lifetime of repressed emotions, and the flood waters are finally free. It is the crack of a soul…

A stuttering student is hypnotized to cure his impediment. A strong wind blows across a field. A ceiling collapses in a rainshower. A bird lands on a boy’s head. A sleeping woman levitates over her bed. A man clutches some feathers in his hand, and a bird flies out.   It is difficult to imagine…

In approximately a decade’s time, if not slightly longer, Nicholas Ray directed a corpus of artistically successful films comparable to William Wyler’s run of exceptional movies in the 1940s and 1950s, to Yasujiro Ozu’s mature work from 1949 to 1962, and to Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematic experiments in the 1960s. Like Godard (who was deeply influenced…

When we first see the priest, he is leaning over a grieving woman.  He is reading the Bible to her and praying for her.  He is doing his duty.  Father Barry has just arrived after longshoreman Joey Doyle was pushed to his death from the top of a tall building.  Edie is the woman who is in shreds on…

It seems hardly coincidental that two films on the life of children’s television host and ordained Presbyterian minister Fred Rogers were released in as many years.  A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), a feature starring Tom Hanks and directed by Marielle Heller, was nominated for the Top 100 but didn’t make the cut.  Morgan Neville’s 2018 documentary, Won’t…

This Israeli-made film, the first collaborative effort between Israel’s religious and secular communities, is a small gem of a film. This film takes us into a world we haven’t seen before on film, inside an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem.  Here a married couple, Moshe and Mali, are preparing for the Jewish harvest holiday of…