In The Fencer Endel Nelis (M?rt Avandi) arrives in the small town of Haapsalu, Estonia, to take a job in a school. Among his duties is to have a sports club. But no one is very interested, until one of his students finds him practicing his fencing and asked to be...
?Why do you dance?? Leap! is a story of dreams and heart, of overcoming failure, of finding the answers to the questions that matter most. It?s not unlike any number of films (I?ll refer to a few of them later), yet sometimes hearing a familiar story in a new setting...
?Modernity is killing me.? The 1960s were a time of momentous change. We remember much of the social upheaval, but we often forget what major shifts happened in the church. As a bishop says in The Passion of Augustine, ?Everything is moving too fast. Modernism is...
?So long space remains So long sentient beings remain So long suffering remains I will remain. In order to serve. That is the real purpose of our life.? Documentarian Mickey Lemle first made a film about the 14th Dalai Lama (Compassion in Exile) in 1991. Now that His...
?You?re our most unwelcome visitor, and we do not propose to entertain you.? What is it that corrupts our lives? In The Beguiled, Sofia Coppola?s Southern Gothic film set in the Civil War, there seems to be a world that is pure and innocent. But is it really? Is this...
The modern American frontier has been a subject that Taylor Sheridan has been coming to from different angles in recent films. Wind River represents his ?conclusion of a thematic trilogy? that includes Sicario and Hell or High Water. Three very different films, but...
?Brigsby Bear may sound like the title of a children?s TV show (and, in fact, in this film it is), but this isn?t a children?s movie. This is a look at home, family, and belonging. It is also a story about coming to grips with a world you never knew but now must live...
?The whole of life, already framed, right there.? It?s hard to assign Maudie to any one genre. Certainly it qualifies as biography. But it is also a bit of art history. It?s an inspirational story of finding success and happiness against terrible odds. And at its...
Farce, to me, occupies a place between the Shakespearean comedies of people falling in love and the modern romcom. False Confessions is a twenty-first century update of an eighteenth century French farce. If it seems stagy it is because of more than just its...