Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is a film set in two worlds, but one that takes place entirely on Earth. The first act of Stalker shows us an unnamed, dilapidated city shot in washed-out sepia tones so murky and muted it is difficult to imagine anything surviving there. In this city Read More …
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 Read More …
With a rigorous style that is often off-putting to newcomers, Bresson eschews the usual emotional cues we’ve become conditioned to expect at the movies. His editing is, above all, efficient—refusing to emphasize one moment over another. We’re forced to pay fierce attention and draw our Read More …
“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 Read More …
To witness The Passion of Joan of Arc is to glimpse the soul of a saint in her hour of trial. The film is more than a dramatization, more than a biopic, more than a documentary: It is a spiritual portrait, almost a mystical portrait, of a Read More …
In 2017, when IMAGE Journal still owned and operated the Arts & Faith website, its film issue came with a photo from David Lowery’s A Ghost Story on the cover. Like The Green Knight, that film polarized Arts & Faith members. Lowery’s quiet films are Read More …
The walls are immense. We quiver just to look at them. When we imagine scaling their heights, we tremble all the more because we know that to fall from them would be our death. This is us, the audience, at the start of Asghar Farhadi’s Read More …
The first time I wrote about Annette I compared it to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Mulholland Drive. I still think that is one of the most apt comparisons to describe Leos Carax’s hypnotic and meta musical. In my appreciation of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Read More …
Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of West Side Story begins with what looks like a shot from the director’s 1998 film Saving Private Ryan. The camera hovers over a crumbling city, swooping past a wrecking ball as it haunts the remains of a once bustling neighborhood. Eventually, Read More …
In Luke 4:5-6, the devil tempts Jesus by showing “him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment in time” and tells him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give Read More …