In 2013 I began watching over 500 movies and finished about half that number. (Film Critic Tip #1: don’t finish movies you plan not to write about that aren’t any good unless they are sublimely bad). Perhaps I’ve grown surly in my fourth decade or perhaps I always was. I just feel like I don’t have the time anymore. Sometimes I went weeks without watching a film, an unimaginable possibility in my recent past. Was this all driven by a sense that my life (and perhaps yours) will be shorter than we think, that the safeguards we’re building against the […]
by Brandon Harris on Dec 27, 2013The most evocative and engrossing picture this writer has ever encountered about the life and times of a thinker is Hannah Arendt, German filmmaker and actress Margarethe von Trotta’s magnificent meditation on the incendiary political theorist. Reuniting with her Vision (2009) and Rosa Luxemburg (1986) star Barbara Sukowa, the ex-Fassbinder muse has delivered a titanic and highly unusual work, a film of rare intelligence that animates the life of a protean mind in a manner that is at once spartan, highly dramatic, and incredibly timely. Hannah Arendt focuses on the period immediately before, during and after Arendt’s famous coverage of the Adolf Eichmann […]
by Brandon Harris on May 29, 2013