Movies

January, 1987

Winner of a coveted Golden Palm at Cannes as the best picture of 1986, director Roland Joffé's The Mission (Warner) is superbly acted, wildly beautiful and challenging. Joffé, who set a high standard with The Killing Fields in 1984, now plows through much tougher terrain, seeking to bring forth what is filmworthy in Robert Bolt's somewhat schematic screenplay about genocide in South America circa 1750. It's a cautionary tale of an innocent, Christianized tribe of natives being sacrificed for pol...