Fourteen-year old Lewis MacDougall gives one of the 2016’s best performances in a film that is compelling and beautiful. A Monster Calls explores faith, letting go, and the search for healing. Based on the award-winning book by Patrick Ness, J.A. Bayona directs a story that takes audiences Read More …
In a year of excellent documentaries—Cameraperson, The Witness, O.J: Made in America—Tower is a film of immense emotional heft. The film serves as a formal exercise in collective memory, a memorial recording both the horrors of human depravity as well as the redemptive courage that can emerge out Read More …
Set in the early 1970s on the north coast of Scotland, Breaking the Waves nevertheless feels strangely timeless. With its bleak backdrop and its puritanical locals—who attend fire-and-brimstone sermons, of course—it recalls the stark environs of Carl Dreyer’s films. When Bess, a woman of what seems Read More …
Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but when offered up within movies, it’s usually piping hot. Such is the case with The Virgin Spring, a quiet film that slowly builds to an explosion of violence. Inspired by a thirteenth-century ballad, director Ingmar Bergman and Read More …
If Jesus were alive on Earth today, and if he had been born in an African slum, what kinds of things would he care about? How would the era and culture shape his ministry? Son of Man seeks to explore these questions. Working with the South Read More …
Two school boys, one a son of a privileged French family, the other a Jew with an assumed name, accidentally separate themselves from their schoolmates in the woods during a spirited game of capture the flag. Julien Quentin experiences the rush of fear as he Read More …
The delicate balance between ministry and madness—explored in other Top 100 films such as Ordet and The Apostle—takes a real life turn in Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher, an informative and revealing documentary that explores the life of a struggling evangelist trying to follow and Read More …
Andrei Tarkovsky’s paints The Sacrifice with Ingmar Bergman’s palette. The location, language, actors, and themes are familiar enough to those familiar with Bergman’s work, but something is askew, the way a dream might blend Shame (1968) and The “Faith Trilogy” into a baroque stage play about an ethereal Cold Read More …
It’s amusing to consider that at the same time members of the French New Wave such as Godard and Truffaut were noisily clamoring for a cinematic revolution, a fellow countryman and former mime was thumbing his nose at modernity through an almost wordless screen persona. Monsieur Read More …
At first glance, Robert Bresson seems like an incompetent director. In Pickpocket, his actors move stiffly, reciting their lines with hardly any emotion; he skips over what seem like important dramatic moments and lingers on seemingly trivial ones; background music is rarely used, and it shows Read More …