In The Phantom Carriage, director Victor Sjöström plays David Holm, a heartless unrepentant rascal who receives two summons one New Year’s midnight. The first is from a dying nun who showed him the most undeserved act of mercy he ever received; the second is from the Read More …
When we first see the priest, he is leaning over a grieving woman. He is reading the Bible to her and praying for her. He is doing his duty. Father Barry has just arrived after longshoreman Joey Doyle was pushed to his death from the top of a Read More …
“All creation groans” in the unforgettable, long shots that open and close Carlos Reygadas’ remarkable film. It’s hard to believe this movie was released in 2008—it has a quality that will make it a major event for film students for many decades to come. It’s Read More …
Director Frank Borzage first transports us to a dark, ugly, seedy world of poverty and inequality in Paris. The pre-code masterpiece deals with the later-taboo topics of abuse, prostitution and atheism. The Hayes’ Code was designed to present and protect “moral decency” on film. But Read More …
“This was not just a matter of chance,” the narrator of Magnolia tells us, and so begins an odyssey of coincidence, absurdity, failure, and redemption. A television producer lies dying, his memory failing, crying out for his estranged son. A cable-TV pseudo-celebrity, renowned for his seminars on Read More …
The more particular you make your story, the more universal it becomes, or so they say. And Norman Jewison’s adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof (1971), one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history, is certainly a case in point. On the surface, it is a story Read More …
Few political issues reveal the divisions among people who claim to be religious or spiritual more than does the death penalty. Like Dead Man Walking, the other great death penalty film on this list, At the Death House Door, argues passionately that the death penalty traumatizes those Read More …
The Mission confronts us with deeply spiritual questions: · What are we to make of the fact that the European missionaries often served as the vanguard of colonialism yet also became the staunchest defenders of the colonized against colonial plunder and oppression? · To what extent will or Read More …
Woody Allen got his start lampooning the deadly serious foreign films that were all the rage in the 1960s and 1970s. Then the former stand-up comic began to emulate (some might say imitate) those films as he turned out dramas like Interiors and September. Along the way, he Read More …
Peter Weir’s Witness was in the very first (unranked) Arts & Faith Top 100 list, but it failed to appear in the 2005, 2006, 2010, or 2011 lists. That first list was filled with commercial Hollywood fare, decisions that perhaps said more about the group’s Read More …