“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 …
Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I would reply: Create silence! The Word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today. Read More …
Some of the most intriguing artistic tributes to faith and religion come from nonbelievers. A Man For All Seasons, the great drama of the life and martyrdom of St. Thomas More, was written for the stage and screen by the non-Christian Robert Bolt. The story of The Read More …
The Miracle Maker is a singular achievement: a Jesus movie simple enough for children, sophisticated enough for scripture scholars and theologians, and artful enough for discerning cinephiles. A joint project of Welsh and Russian animation houses, the film was co-directed by Derek W. Hayes and Stanislav Read More …
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world. What can be shown, cannot be said. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” –Ludwig Wittgenstein In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus the great twentieth century philosophy Ludwig Wittgenstein attempted to define the limits Read More …
At the beginning of Paul Schrader’s elegant take on contemporary Christian spirituality in the mode of classic transcendental cinema, a very faint white cross appears in the title card between First and Reformed. As the sun rises over the shot, the cross resolves glimmering on the steeple of Read More …