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 …
Because Nasim is an Afghani refugee who can barely provide for his family as an itinerant well-digger in Iran, he doesn’t have enough money to pay for the treatment that could spare his wife in the local hospital. Stuck in a health care system simply Read More …
Before My Night at Maud’s became the routine representative of Rohmer’s work at Arts & Faith, The Green Ray had its moments of being favored. The story of a young woman being disenchanted with the way society treats singles might, perhaps, speak more pointedly to Read More …
As the son of a Lutheran pastor, faith and doubt is at the center of many of Bergman’s films, perhaps nowhere more explicitly than in this film, Winter Light, and The Silence. The necessity of doubt as a means to enrich one’s faith, or learning to see Read More …
