If like is what happens while you are making other plans, great documentaries are often those that result from sudden and unexpected navigational shifts. Nowhere is that more evident than in the films of Barbara Kopple. A profile of the Dixie Chicks takes on new Read More …
Were I to be catapulted one hundred years into the future, I would not be surprised to find the critical history of the twentieth century bookended by Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet. The critical reputation of both works is propelled by Read More …
Based on Ernest Gordon’s Through the Valley of the Kwai (which also served as a basis for Lean’s The Bridge over the River Kwai), To End All Wars directly engages the spiritual battles faced by Japanese prisoners of war. The film asks–in the most extreme of examples–what forgiveness really means Read More …
Like the Bible itself, Franco Zeffirelli’s epic, ambitious made-for-television Jesus of Nazareth is often experienced in bits and pieces over the years, and is commonly better known in isolated parts than in its lengthy whole. Viewed as a whole, Jesus of Nazareth may or may not be the best Read More …
Listen. This is the first word spoken in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes’ latest masterpiece, a parabolic moral mystery that is at-once quite ordinary in terms of its genre conventions, yet extraordinary in its formal brilliance and ethical considerations. Listen. The speaker is Jenny (Adèle Haenel), a youthful, Read More …
Winner of last year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, The Salesman did not receive a wide release until this year, and it is one of Farhadi’s most powerful films yet. The imitation between art and life blurs after two married actors are forced to evacuate their Read More …
In this unflinching look into childhood below the poverty line on the streets just east of the Magic Kingdom, Sean Baker continues his provocative filmmaking tour of the invisible American classes. Though their play is scripted by their parents’ cycles of violence and addiction, six-year-old Read More …
I grieve, therefore I am: if there is a single characteristic that grounds the personal identity of Kristen Stewart’s dissociative expat Maureen, it’s the yearning she feels to reconnect with her recently deceased twin brother. It’s the mark not only of her existence, but also Read More …
“Our world has set itself afire. I must look elsewhere to quench the blaze.” James Gray’s film tells the story of British explorer Percy Fawcett’s search for an ancient civilization deep in the Amazon jungle in the years before and after the First World War. Read More …
