Destiny

Fritz Lang’s first five surviving films are largely workmanlike films that seem to be chasing simple pleasures of popular genre. Destiny, Lang’s seventh film, is outright art. Part of a small subgenre of dramas of the era (like Leaves from Satan’s Book by Dreyer) heavily inspired by DW Griffith’s Intolerance that told interrelated tales across different eras of history, Fritz Lang’s Destiny has one of the strongest framing devices I’ve seen in this kind of film. There’s a wonderful emotional...