?God is nature, and nature is beauty.? The life of Vincent Van Gogh with all its spiritual and psychological challenges is well known. In At Heaven?s Gate, from artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel, we see scenes from his life?some based on his letters, some from...
How does one survive without being ?officially? a person? For people such as refugees or the poor, there may be no paper trail of their existence. In Capernaum, from Lebanese director Nadine Labaki, we see a boy struggle with life in that kind of world. Zain (Zain Al...
?Tis the season of heartwarming holiday movies featuring cute kids, Santa Claus, and the joy of the season. The French film Santa Claus (Le P?re No?l), available this Christmas season on VOD, fits these criteria, but in a bit of a twisted way. Six year-old Victor...
Backtrace is a story of memory, remembrance, and pain. But mostly it is a film about losing things we haven?t even appreciated losing. When a trio of bank robbers go to meet the inside men who planned it all, a shoot-out occurs. Two of the robbers lay dead. The third,...
Most of the Michael Polish film Nona seems like a dream. There are new young people who seem to have a wonderful life opening up for them. But for one of them this dream turns into a nightmare. A young Honduran woman (Sulem Calderon) lives in a shanty town. She seems...
Vox Lux is a story of the loss of innocence. It is also a reflection on the possibility of losing one?s foundational values along with that innocence. While we see this play out in the life of a girl and the woman she becomes, it may also give us pause to think about...
?There are over 200 million children making the things we buy.? If you look around your desk, or your pantry, you will almost certainly see products that come to you because of child labor (which is very often slavery). You may already know this (I did), but think...
In Everybody Knows, director Asghar Farhadi leaves Iranian stresses behind (cf., A Separation, The Past, and The Salesman) for a more Eurocentric story. His previous films focus on people dealing with the tensions between two cultures. This film is a more conventional...
Winner of the Palme d?Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year, Shoplifters is a part of Hirokazu Kore-eda?s examination of family?s place within society. This is a topic he has looked at from various angles in other films, notably Like Father, Like Son; Our Little...