Tags: Vatican Film List: Values
A+ |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
Developed in Rome during the Nazi occupation, shot in the Eternal City shortly after the Nazi withdrawal, Roberto Rossellini’s
Rome Open City stunned audiences the world over who saw in it an unmediated authenticity more evocative of the documentary quality of wartime newsreels than of the artificiality of earlier, more conventional WWII dramas.
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A+ |
**** |
+4|
Kids & Up*
Two very different approaches to religion and sport are at the
heart of
Chariots of Fire, a period piece that explores
timeless themes of temporal ambitions and higher purposes, of
commitment and sacrifice, of ability and spirit.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
Au Revoir Les Enfants, Louis Malle’s semi-autobiographical film about life in a Catholic boarding school for boys in Nazi-occupied France, has been called an elegy of innocence lost, though in fact the youthful characters are never truly innocent, only clueless, and what they lose is not innocence but something more elusive.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
A defining landmark of Italian neorealism and a haunting fable of want and desperation, Vittorio De Sica’s
Ladri di Biciclette, traditionally known as
The Bicycle Thief in the US but released in the UK with the more accurate title translation of
Bicycle Thieves, tells a story of such simplicity and power that one could sum up the key events in a single sentence — as in fact many reviews of the film do, though this one will not — and someone who had never seen the film might read the sentence and remember the premise forever.
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A |
**** |
+3|
Teens & Up*
Kon Ichikawa’s deeply humane, spiritually resonant masterpiece
The Burmese Harp is routinely but reductionistically described as “pacifist” or “anti-war,” though in fact war is merely the occasion for the story’s theme, not the theme itself. That theme is nothing less than the intractable mystery of suffering and evil, an affirmation of spiritual values, and the challenge to live humanely in evil circumstances.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
For Bergman’s protagonist, an elderly doctor named Isak Borg
(Victor Sjöström) who significantly shares Bergman’s
initials, there is bitter as well as sweet in the fields of his
mind. The film is a road trip that is also a journey of
self-discovery as Borg is forced to confront his own coldness of
heart and need for forgiveness.
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A- |
**** |
+3-3|
Teens & Up*
Starkly existential, boldly poetic, slow and grim, Ingmar Bergman’s great classic
The Seventh Seal has haunted film aficionados, baffled and bored college students, inspired innumerable parodists, and challenged both believers and unbelievers for nearly half a century.
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A+ |
**** |
+3|
Adults*
As he first did decades earlier with
Jaws, Spielberg
reaches past our defenses by suggesting rather than showing: he
knows there is as much horror in a mountain of shoes and personal
effects whose owners won’t be needing them again as in a mountain
of bodies. In fact, one of the film’s most ghastly moments is
nothing more than a mere rude gesture from a small child.
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A |
**** |
+3|
Teens & Up
Critic Dave Kehr of the
Chicago Reader calls
The
Tree of the Wooden Clogs "less an advance over the standard
film festival peasant epic than an unusually accomplished
rendition of it," and speaks of a "Marxist sentimentalism"
inherent in its subject matter and approach. This seems to me
misleading. Olmi’s film may be best thought of, not as an
attempted advance over the typically Marxist neorealist peasant
epic, but as a redemption of it.
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B+ |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
Intolerance is a grandiose composite epic, interweaving
four separate morality plays from different eras and settings,
from 20th-century America (the "Modern Story") to Old Testament
times (the "Babylonian Story"). Rounding out the four are a brief
survey of the life and death of Christ (the "Galilean Story"
[sic; most of it is set in Judea, not Galilee]) and events
from the 16th-century persecution and massacre of Huguenot
Protestants under the Medicis, including the St. Bartholomew’s
Day Massacre (the "French Story").
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A |
***½ |
+3-1|
Teens & Up
Overshadowing even Ben Kingsley’s astonishing, transcendent performance in his first major screen role is a larger, more formidable presence: that of Mohandas K. Gandhi himself.
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**** |
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Adults
The Decalogue, Kieslowski’s
extraordinary, challenging collection of ten one-hour films made
for Polish television in the dying days of the Soviet Union,
doesn’t answer those questions either. What it does is pose them
as hauntingly and seriously as any cinematic effort in the last
twenty years.
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A |
***½ |
+3|
Kids & Up*
Vladimir Arseniev was an early 20th-century explorer who
mapped much of the krai territory of the Russian Far East and
studied its indigenous peoples. Based on his memoirs, Akira
Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala tells the story of an unusual
friendship between Arseniev (Yuri Solomin) and the nomadic tribal
hunter for whom the film is named (Maksim Munzuk).
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A |
**** |
+3|
Teens & Up
“A
Going My Way with substance” is how Elia Kazan’s classic, controversial
On the Waterfront was recently described in a lecture at Boston College.
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A+ |
**** |
+3|
Kids & Up*
“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
It’s a Wonderful Life, exemplify the film’s popular but misleading image as sentimental, schmaltzy “Capra-corn.” Yet the film itself is leavened by darker themes and more rigorous morals about self-sacrifice, disappointment, and the fragility of happiness and the American dream.
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