Aging is a scandal to utilitarian societies. That is why how we treat the aged is a marker for whether we truly believe in the intrinsic value of life. It is also why retirement or loss of work figures so prominently in films about the Read More …
One of the sublime pleasures of the UP documentaries is getting to know a dozen people who were willing to be reflective in an unstudied way we likely won’t see again, given the ubiquity of confessional television and our online age, where many of us Read More …
Near the opening of this film, 66-year old Mi-ja listens to her poetry teacher leading the class in a lesson about seeing : ‘How many times have you seen an apple? ..You’ve never seen an apple before. Not even once. Until now, you haven’t seen Read More …
Though not literally his swan song as a director, in Limelight Charlie Chaplin says his final word on the symbols of his youthful career as a vaudevillian and silent film clown. The faded glory of one last performance, one last moment in the limelight, can never be Read More …
If a man lives long enough, growing older will mean that he has to reckon with the impermanence of what seemed fixed in his youth meeting with the inevitable recurrence of those things he thought he had put behind him. The Archers’ elegiac epic chronicles Read More …
Yasujiro Ozu’s LATE SPRING (1949) is the story of Shukichi, a widowed professor, and Noriko, his unmarried twenty-seven year-old daughter who lives with him and has recently recovered from an illness. The two get along extraordinarily well, and Noriko is content to care for her Read More …
Here’s the drama: A baby camel is born, and the mother rejects it. Sounds unimpressive, but filmmakers Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni found quite a story in southern Mongolia, and they caught it with their cameras. A family living in a close-knit series of beautifully Read More …
Near a small American town, during the Cold War, something falls from the sky. It’s not widely noticed, and most speculation as to its nature is written off as crackpot theorizing. But soon afterwards, a young boy encounters and befriends the extra-terrestrial visitor to our Read More …
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 …