An early episode of a sacramental canticle recited by a monotonic, impassive chorus (in an oddly surreal scene that fuses home economics and religion) provides an integrally illuminating puzzle piece to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s maddeningly opaque and fragmented, yet abstractly intriguing and curiously resonant film, Not Reconciled: How shall we redeem the world? […]
A novelist named Eugene Fitzpatrick (Sam Neill) recounts in dispassionate voiceover that in 1999, an Indian nuclear-powered satellite had fallen from its designated Earth orbit, setting the spacecraft on a steadfast, but indeterminate trajectory towards an inevitable impact with the planet. Areas that were identified as potential impact sites experienced mass exodus, causing people to […]
Wim Wender’s deliberately paced, hauntingly realized contemporary masterpiece, Wings of Desire is, all at once: a political allegory for the reunification of Germany, an existential parable on a soul’s search for connection, a metaphor for the conflict between, what Friedrich Nietzsche defines as, the Appolinian intellect and the Dionysian passion, a euphemism for creation. A […]