Filmwell last 10 days: Rectify/Aquinas, Day of Wrath, The Strange Little Cat, Grigris

Filmwell, an excellent film commentary site had four posts the last ten days

The wrote about an episode of the TV series Rectify titled Mazel Tov:

Rectify marks the first time I have seen a TV show reference Thomas Aquinas. In a moment of reconciliation between Tawny and Teddy, Teddy picks up the book on Tawny’s nightstand and reads:
“Love may be of the seen and of the unseen, of the present and of the absent. Consequently a thing to be loved is not so adapted to faith, as a thing to be hoped for, since hope is always of the absent and the unseen. “
This comes from the Second Part of the Second Part of Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica, which deals with the nature of faith.

Day of WrathThey covered a 1943 Danish movie, Day of Wrath, set in the 17th century. Their conclusion:

There is above all a relentless honesty to the director’s gaze: he challenges us to look on the terrifying mix of pitiable humanity and self-serving evil that coexist in the human heart, and to our shame we flinch and look away, seeing only what it serves us to see – thereby implicating ourselves in the very evils we see (or don’t see) on the screen in front of us.

Their coverage of The Strange Little Cat (Das merkwürdige Kätzchen),a  German movie from last year included this summary:

[The] binary scheme of “magical” or “nuts” is essentially the drama of The Strange Little Cat, one of the best films I have seen in the past few years. Though the film at times hints at much darker subtexts than are present in its exchanges – its kindness, its clarity, and its crafted denial of an ironic pose is refreshing.

Finally, M Leary, the author of the blog, commented on Grigris:

 It is a good reminder of how cinema watches people sharing the material weight of their anxieties with us, Démé physically narrating the hoped-for release from the cruelties he has encountered. It is incredible to watch him momentarily reject the idea that his withered leg is a liability, totally at ease with himself – though we then track with him, and his painful looking limp, through the rest of the film.
Trailer

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