You know the old joke about a Monet looking better from afar? Well, so it is that my favorite shot from Silent Light is a dissolve into a blurry pastoral landscape, reminiscent of one of Monet's impressionist paintings, but as a pink flower comes slowly into focus, so does Carlos Reygadas's synthetic take on spiritual struggle. A work of singular cinematographic splendor, Silent Light is also a regression for Reygadas as an artist, theorist, and activist. Essentially a succession of passive, postcard-pretty shots of Chihuahua, Mexico, the film tells the impossibly muted story of a marriage coming undone because of a Mennonite man's affair with another woman, evincing none of the sexual danger and philosophical and political complexities of Japón and Battle in Heaven.