Silence (2016)

Having at one point in his life hoped to be a Catholic priest Martin Scorsese is one of our more unconventionally religious filmmakers. He's made a number of religiously themed films before, such as Kundon, and most famous and controversially The Last Temptation of Christ. Scorsese first started working on turning Silence, a 1966 historical novel about Roman Catholic priests in 17th century Japan by the author Shūsaku Endō, into a film around 1990. As can often happen with an unconventional passion project the movie got pushed back. The finished feature is a tale of two Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who go to Japan in search of a lost colleague (Liam Neeson) who disappeared in an intense period of persecution years before, and are subsequently horribly tortured and forced to confront the limits of their faith. The film juxtaposes some of the worst of humanity with some its best, beautiful locations, horrible acts, humility and pride. It does all of this with a disagree of silence that can be somewhat disorienting. It is a meditative movie that even in the few instances when it can be said to force feed you interpretations of things, does so with enough ambiguity to keep you wondering. The film is unmistakably a work of art, I can admire it in a number of ways, though in its quietness it did not prompt the strong emotional reaction one might typically expect of a movie of this sort. Non the less it rates the full ****