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Sunday, June 11, 2023

280. Russian maestro Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky’s 24th feature film “Sin“ (Il Peccato) (2019), in Italian: A fascinating study on Michelangelo’s thoughts and actions while leading a near hermitic life and creating monumental works of art

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“ A rrogance is sin”     “ I wanted to find God; I only found Man”       “ M oney always rubs elbows with infamy”               --key lin...
Saturday, April 22, 2023

279. Iranian film director Mohammad Rasoulof’s second feature film “Jazireh Ahani “ (Iron Island) (2005), based on his original screenplay: Brave cinema focusing on the travails faced by the common citizen, using allegory to bypass hawkish national censors

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M ohammad Rasoulof is different from most filmmakers. He does not adapt written works—he writes his own original screenplays stitched togeth...
Saturday, December 17, 2022

278. US film director Todd Field’s third feature film “Tár” (2022), based on his original screenplay: An intelligent, well-crafted study of the decline, fall, and eventual survival of a gifted, renowned (possibly, partly fictional) maestro

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  Quotes from the film that provide glimpses of the thought-provoking script: (Tár, being interviewed by Adam Gopnik   in front of a live...
Thursday, September 15, 2022

277. Japanese film director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s fifteenth feature film “Broker” (2022), based on his original screenplay, set in South Korea and made in the Korean language: “Finding ourselves and each other”

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    "'Thank you for being born.' - A single sentence that touches the audience in such a way that entire films rarely can. When...
Monday, August 22, 2022

276. The late French director Bertrand Tavernier’s feature film “Ça commence aujourd'hui” (It All Starts Today) (1999), based on a commendable screenplay co-written by the director, his daughter Tiffany, and Dominique Sampiero: A primary school teacher who walks the extra mile to serve and speak for the tiny tots raised by parents with marginal incomes

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    "For its commitment to everyday heroism, its multi-layered approach to an array of social problems, and for the visual force of the...
Wednesday, June 22, 2022

275. Italian director Paolo Taviani’s twenty-second feature film “Leonora addio” (2022), based on his original screenplay: A fitting, unique tribute to the Nobel Prize in Literature winner Luigi Pirandello and to the late film director Vittorio Taviani from the 91-year-old Paolo, younger brother of Vittorio

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    “Have any of you read Pirandello?” asks a senior priest in a Sicilian seminary to his junior priests  “I read him in secret, then I conf...