Ronald Colman’s Sydney Carton is an alcoholic barrister who, despite his natural intelligence and legal talent, has allowed his personal life to empty of both love and meaning. Then, despite his dissolute and failed lifestyle, he is offered only the mercy of mere friendship by Read More …
The Dardenne brothers craft cinematic parables that evoke an ethical imagination within the viewer through subverting expectations. At first glance, The Son may feel like a typical revenge thriller as a carpenter (Olivier Gourmet) takes a young man as an apprentice with the knowledge that this troubled Read More …
The Elephant Man dramatizes the true story of Joseph Merrick, named John in the film, a man suffering from a to-this-day undiagnosed combination of shocking physical deformities. Lynch’s film, his second feature following Eraserhead, tells of Merrick’s (John Hurt) discovery in a freak show by Dr. Frederick Read More …
Influenced by Dreyer, Boleslawski’s cinematic version of Victor Hugo’s classic possesses both whole-hearted sincerity and unabashed Christianity. The lost life of the justifiably bitter and disillusioned Jean Valjean (Frederic March) is transformed by the mercy offered him by Bishop Myriel (Sir Cedric Hardwicke). Meanwhile, Javert Read More …
Wong Kar Wai has observed that critics tend to read the title of this movie ironically, but that for him there is no irony. No irony in the title, perhaps, but Happy Together is deeply concerned with the fundamental irony that mercy all too often can tip Read More …
The Ox-Bow Incident is a movie about mercy refused. The citizens of Ox-Bow are hardened men and women, reacting in fear against an outside terror that binds them together into an unthinking mass and blinds them to the real humanity of their victims. Yet throughout the Read More …
Chaplin intoxicates us from the very first scene. As the silent era passes, he graces the human voice with soap bubbles, whistles, and the most poignant title cards ever screened. He lets the touch of a hand work the miracle that technology cannot. And he Read More …
In The Phantom Carriage, director Victor Sjöström plays David Holm, a heartless unrepentant rascal who receives two summons one New Year’s midnight. The first is from a dying nun who showed him the most undeserved act of mercy he ever received; the second is from the Read More …
Released in 1932, two years before Hollywood studios began enforcing the restrictive guidelines of the Motion Picture Production Code, William A. Wellman’s Frisco Jenny remains shockingly modern in 2016. Ruth Chatterton stars in the title role, as a good-hearted gal turned madam and bootlegger who is fiercely Read More …
We’ve seen some powerful, horrifying films about the war in Rwanda. But we’ve never seen anything like this—a film made with the help of Rwandans, informed by their own experiences, and performed in their own language. Sangwa’s a prodigal son of the Hutu. He’s come Read More …