On a Top 100 list that threatens top-heaviness with clergy, saints, and organized religion, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a welcome outlier. Its writer/director, Werner Herzog, professes no interest in God or religion, except as a subject for cultural exploration, a manifestation of our humanity. Yet his films, Read More …
A Catholic pilgrimage underscored by a Lutheran chorale, a nun abandoning her duties to have an affair, a skeptic receiving a miraculous cure ahead of more devout pilgrims. A cliché I can’t stand says “God moves in mysterious ways,” and while it is possible to Read More …
Kon Ichikawa’s deeply humane, spiritually resonant masterpiece is routinely but reductionistically described as “pacifist” or “anti-war.” War, though, is the occasion for the central theme, not the theme itself, which is nothing less than the intractable mystery of suffering and evil, affirmation of spiritual values, Read More …
The shift from Yi Yi to A Brighter Summer Day is one of the more surprising changes to the 2020 version of the Arts & Faith Top 100. The former was on every previous version of the Arts & Faith list. The latter, initially released in 1991, had not Read More …
Rick Deckard: She’s a replicant, isn’t she?Dr. Eldon Tyrell: I’m impressed. How many questions does it usually take to spot one?Deckard: I don’t get it, Tyrell.Tyrell: How many questions?Deckard: Thirty, forty, cross-referenced.Tyrell: It took more than a hundred for Rachael, didn’t it?Deckard: She doesn’t know.Tyrell: Read More …
“I’ll be the face of love for you,” Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon) tells a soon-to-be-executed murderer. The idea that a film can transcend (or sidestep) political ideologies has always been questioned, but the intertwining of the moral and the political has certainly been on Read More …
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 Read More …
Based on the eponymous historical novel by Jewish author Franz Werfel, Henry King’s beautifully made film stands head and shoulders over most religiously themed fare from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Werfel learned the story of Bernadette Soubirous—an illiterate teenager who in 1858 claimed to see visions Read More …
