Someone on here posited that Mike Leigh’s central question is “how should a person be,” but his best work also asks what, if anything, we owe other persons: should our good conduct towards them be unconditional, or dependent on what we think they deserve?
Like Juror #2, another late-era masterpiece released recently, Hard Truths explores the limits of forgiveness and self-sacrifice. But where that film hardens its gaze, invoking the abstraction of justice to deem us all guilty, this one,…
A very special trip to the movies with my dad, with whom I’ve watched so many of Clint’s movies. I felt strongly that we owed it to the man to drive the two hours it took to get to the nearest screening and see what is by all accounts his last film.
All great American narrative art deals in questions of guilt and absolution. If it’s ultimately unsurprising that a studio would bury a film whose underlying assumption is that…
Just perfect. My favorite film by my favorite director. Very grateful to have had the opportunity to see this on 35mm as part of the Harvard Film Archive’s Ozu retrospective this summer. A few stray thoughts prompted by this viewing:
• Ozu is much funnier than he gets credit for, and while this certified-weepie is nobody’s first choice as proof of that, there are lots of moments in the script that I never realized were jokes in my home-viewings. Definitely…
As beautiful as I remembered and then some, thanks to the quality of the restoration and the satisfaction of watching it after rewatching the rest of Tarkovsky’s filmography. Solidifies this as my favorite of his films and the man himself as one of my favorite directors.
It’s hard to imagine a more successful exploration of the nexus between faith and art, but saying this film is about either is a bit like saying Moby-Dick is about a whale. Like Melville’s masterpiece, Tarkovsky’s is a whole world unto itself.
