“Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen.” The cinema of Robert Bresson is difficult to crystallize, but the great director himself came close with these words. The rhythm of a Bresson film has one purpose—to uncover, layer by layer, the effervescent connections Read More …
Across the 16 years that Arts & Faith has been making Top 100 lists, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) has always been well-represented. This film has made every list, while earlier iterations have included Rashomon, Dersu Uzala, and/or Ran. Had we not imposed a “one film per director” rule, Read More …
“Do the right thing” is a simple phrase that can be easier said than done at times. As a child, my parents would tell me to “do the right thing”. They’d also ask me “what’s the right thing to do?”, in order to guide me Read More …
Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne—popularly known as “the Dardenne brothers”—make genuine cinematic parables. By “parable” I mean films about ordinary or mundane circumstances which have no ostensible religious or sacred element, yet prove to provoke a sense of the transcendent, what philosopher Paul Ricoeur Read More …
After wrestling with this film for three weeks, what I ultimately take away from it is that it’s a movie about love. In A Man For All Seasons, Thomas More says to his daughter shortly before his execution, “Finally, it’s not a matter of reason…finally, it’s Read More …
Can Christians and Muslims coexist in peace today? Xavier Beauvois’ sublime fact-based drama about seven French Trappist monks in northern Algeria in the 1990s during the Algerian Civil War explores the question without offering a definitive answer. Led by Dom Christian (Lambert Wilson), the monks Read More …
“Babette can cook.” It’s a seemingly simple sentence offered as an offhand suggestion in a letter to Danish sisters Martine and Filippa (Birgitte Federspiel and Bodil Kjer) as one way an unknown refugee from France could help them should they take her in. And yet, Read More …
How does one adequately describe a poem, a prayer, and a visual odyssey in mere prose? This is the challenge when attempting to capture the cinema of Terrence Malick in words. A work of cosmic praise and lament, Malick’s 2011 Palme d’Or-winning film, The Tree of Read More …
In the spirituality of the Christian East, icons are sometimes described as “windows into heaven.” Even when they depict earthly events, their stylized approach is meant to evoke transcendent realities. Such transcendence in art is both the subject and the method of Andrei Tarkovsky’s haunting, Read More …
There have now been six iterations of the Arts & Faith Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films. Of the five in which the results have been ranked, films by Carl Theodor Dreyer have topped four. Until voters in 2020 chose to limit the Top 100 to one entry Read More …