“There are moments when the social world seems more evident in an object or a gesture than in the whole concatenation of our beliefs and institutions.” In this quote, anthropologist David MacDougall encapsulates the ambition of observational cinema with perfect precision. “Through our senses we Read More …
Soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and other social organs of coordinated charity are necessary expressions of mercy in an enlightened society today — a social advance linked directly to the visionary achievements of the 17th-century priest and philanthropic social reformer St. Vincent de Paul, played by Read More …
Marc Rothemund’s fact-based Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is a riveting portrait of a young woman of formidable intellect, dogged self-possession, and excruciatingly steady nerves. At 21, Sophia Magdalena Scholl (Julia Jentsch) is old enough to have outgrown the brash overconfidence of immaturity, but not too old Read More …
For many years I had taped to my office door a copy of Syd Harris’s famous cartoon in which two academics perused a chalkboard with a sea of figures making a complex mathematical formula. Embedded in the middle was the notation “Then a Miracle Occurs.” Modernists don’t Read More …
Bark Cooper, one of the two elderly protagonists of Leo McCarey’s MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (1937), boasts of one and only one accomplishment in his life. When he was a young man, Bark won the heart of his wife Lucy over a rival who became Read More …
“No one is born to be a failure. No one is poor who has friends.” These platitudes, plastered across the packaging of home-video editions of Frank Capra’s evergreen Christmas classic, embody the film’s popular but misleading image as sentimental, schmaltzy “Capra-corn.” Yet the film itself Read More …
I first watched Night and Fog about ten years ago, and it was a haunting, powerful experience that left me shaken and moved. The one scene I most vividly remembered was the cutting from footage of a Nazi train en route to a concentration camp Read More …
There are stories so painful, so terrifying, so true, that they can only be about children. When they are packaged as such, we call them fairy tales. When they are made for and by adults, we sometimes call them horror films. Edmund Burke once argued Read More …
Starkly existential, boldly poetic, slow and grim, Ingmar Bergman’s great classic has haunted film aficionados, baffled and bored college students, inspired innumerable parodists, and challenged both believers and unbelievers for nearly half a century. Bergman’s medieval drama of the soul can be difficult to watch Read More …
In keeping with the Italian neorealist precept of casting non-professional actors in suitable roles, Roberto Rossellini went to the Franciscan friars of the Nocere Inferiore monastery in Rome to cast St. Francis and his followers in this delightful cinematic meditation on the Little Flowers of St. Read More …