An art film disguised as social melodrama, Ratcatcher funnels Scotland’s notorious garbage strike of the 1970s through the eyes of children in an impoverished Glasgow housing project. The film’s beautifully captured images of these kids beset with hardship are remarkably honest, sometimes disturbing, and often haunting. On Read More …
The centerpiece of Ozu’s trilogy of films about the drift of family and tradition in post-war Japan, Early Summer is every bit as gently provocative as its two more celebrated bookends. As far as cinema is concerned, Ozu was ahead of his time, and Early Summer is a great Read More …
Victor Erice’s 1973 poetical allegory of the impact of the Spanish Civil Warwas widely acclaimed at the time of its release and has since been justlyrecognized as a masterpiece of Spanish cinema. The Spirit of the Beehivetells the story of a family living in rural Andalucia in Read More …
Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, a grand tale of unyielding greed set in the American past, tells the tale of an oil prospector named Daniel Plainview, whose all-consuming desire to succeed in his conquest for oil sets him up in opposition to a small-town Read More …
Consensus lists have always struggled with how to place and evaluate polarizing films and directors. Films that are liked and admired by most tend to rank higher than films that are loved by some and loathed by others. The two most polarizing directors in Arts Read More …
In his new book, Generous Justice, Tim Keller has just controversially suggested that if you are not taking an active part in helping the poor, then you are not taking your Christianity seriously. Indeed, you are something of a hypocrite. Sullivan’s Travels is the story of a young, Read More …
At a surface level, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939) looks quite a bit like one of those comedies of manners that western art has been pumping out without interruption over the past five hundred years. Take a group of aristocrats, have them declare their Read More …
Orson Welles famously claimed that his 1962 film, The Trial, an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s seminal novel, was the greatest film he had ever made. Whether or not this is true is certainly up for debate given the richness of Welles’ cinematic oeuvre, but The Trial is, in many Read More …
The fifth feature film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul is superficially a retelling of the moment that the director’s parents met at an occupational psychology interview in a Thai country hospital. This description, however, misrepresents Syndromes’ visually refreshing meditative exploration of first encounters, memories, and place. Syndromes’ meandering Read More …
If Born into Brothels merely recorded the marginal lives of the beautiful, all but doomed children of a Calcutta brothel, it would probably be nearly unbearable, though potentially still worthwhile. But photojournalist Zana Briski, a Cambridge religion student who moved into the Sonagachi red-light district with the Read More …