Risen

It is pure coincidence that I watched Kevin Reynolds' Risen right after finishing Andrei Tarkovsky's body of work, but Tarkovsky's thematic focuses and motifs have really colored my reading of the 2016 film. It didn't influence my overall opinion of Risen, but it does provide some interesting context about why I think this film succeeds…

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Mother Machree

Unranked my my ranking of John Ford's filmography. I can't review this film in full because its state is simply too incomplete to consider fully. There are only four of its seven reels still in existence, and two of the missing reels are the final two. Still, I watched what I could, and while I…

Upstream

#53 in my ranking of John Ford's filmography. Another film filled to the top with amusing side characters, Upstream is a modest and slight entertainment that does well enough to fill its sixty minutes and little else. It's another instance of an early John Ford film that really could have done good use with twenty…

Andrei Tarkovsky: The Definitive Ranking

Andrei Tarkovsky is one of the kings of art house cinema. He made only seven films in his unnaturally shortened career, and he was in constant conflict with the authorities of the Soviet Union about the content of his films, particularly the religious aspects. He began his career during the brief period under Nikita Khrushchev…

The Sacrifice

#3 in my ranking of Andrei Tarkovsky's films. Made while Andrei Tarkovsky knew that he was on death's door, The Sacrifice is the final work of one of cinema's finest filmmakers. A plea in the face of a literal Armageddon on a small scale, it deals with the sense of the apocalypse in the most…