SPRING ACTS of Manoel de Oliveira 1963, Portugal, 1h29, VO STFR, 35 mm In Curahla, in the Trás-os-Montes, every year, the peasants play, on a text of the sixteenth century, the mystery of passion. Manoel de Oliveira and his team come to film the show. Neither documentary nor fiction, the film is a religious action, a masquerade, a Kenneth Anger rite, an amateur film, a dissection of the cinema itself and, of course, a biopic of Christ, executed with sacred fervor and clumsy by hundreds of worshippers in the raw state. It is one of the best films about Christ, because it deals with devotion - its beauty and idiocy - at all levels, and it reflects on the dramatic impulse that underlies religious sentiment." Michael Atkinson