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 …
In the follow-up to their first fiction feature, La Promesse (#44 on the 2010 Arts & Faith Top 100), Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne wrote and directed Rosetta. The film—lean on plot but heavy on character and form—follows a few days in the life Read More …
Early in Rome, Open City, a boy tells his priest, Don Pietro, that he doesn’t have time for catechism because of the war. Roberto Rossellini, Rome’s director, essentially spends the rest of the movie countering that assertion. Rome, Open City is set during the nine-month Nazi occupation Read More …
“In the end, we spend our lives alone.” One cannot help but wonder if the two characters who voice this sentiment during the course of Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon serve as mouthpieces for the director himself. Partway through the writing of this film’s script, Ozu’s mother died; Read More …
The 1970s marked a major turning point for the life and work of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, as the guardedly hopeful portrayals of individual and communal transformation seen in many of his postwar films culminated in his final black-and-white movie, Red Beard (1965). His next four films, Read More …
Lorna skirts the margins of Belgian society, an Albanian immigrant whose sham marriage with a two-bit junkie, a narkoman, serves only to gain her legal residency in the country. Working for a local gangster, she’s already got her next fake marriage lined up which will Read More …
“When film subverts our absorption in the temporal and reveals the depths of our own reality, it opens us to a fuller sense of ourselves and our world. It is alive as a devotional form.” —Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema “If I had a friend who wanted me to Read More …
Robert Bresson’s 1962 version of this famous historical event, based entirely on the minutes from the trial, provides a claustrophobic, reverent, and surprisingly brisk walk through significant moments in Joan’s final days. Clocking in at a mere sixty-one minutes, Bresson’s frequent cuts make the film Read More …
“Perhaps we give the people who come here a chance to forget for a while, for a few short moments, the harsh world outside. Our theater is a little room of orderliness, routine, care and love.” Oscar Ekdahl, Fanny and Alexander Originally slated to be his Read More …
Apparently lost, some men who claim to be treasure hunters drive their jeep through rugged country in what seems like Middle of Nowhere, Iran. It’s actually a Kurdish province, and a polite young boy guides the driver—a man called the Engineer (Behzad Dourani)—into the town Read More …