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 …
There is little, if any, historical accuracy in Amadeus. The portrayal of Mozart (Tom Hulce) as vulgar libertine is certainly based in much historical fact, but as seen through the eyes of Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), the film’s antihero protagonist and unreliable narrator, even the Read More …
Hirokazu Koreeda is a director seemingly preoccupied with death: his films Maborosi, Hana, and Still Walking all focus on characters dealing with the death of a loved one. After Life is also concerned with death, but Koreeda approaches his subject from a different angle in this film. Whereas his other films Read More …
Victoire Thivisol was four years old when she played Ponette, a girl struggling to understand her mother’s death in a car accident. The range and depth of emotion she displays makes me a little worried about what director Jacques Doillon did to coax the performance Read More …