Reel Spirituality

Seven Psychopaths is a parable that should resonate with anyone who values scriptural, fictional, and historical investigations of what violence can do to the soul, and the responsibility of storytellers to honor their power for what it is…

Very occasionally, we choose to not feature an article or review altogether. Today, I chose against featuring one of my own reviews, the one you will find below for Killing Them Softly. Instead, I’m burying it within the site. Congratulations if you found it. Consider it an Easter egg…

In a somewhat ironic turn, the (apparently) transcendent perspective of the music runs counter to and is the complete opposite of the godforsaken indifference with which the film begins. In this sense, the film and the music therein are both confused and confusing regarding transcendence, its possibility, and its significance…

Superman can be a special hero for children who have been adopted.

Are we all simply cogs in the wheels of history, simply tourists passing bewilderingly through modern life, out of place players in a post-modern drama we’ll never really understand? Or is there something distinctly human, magnificent, and special about each of us that makes us more than products of our times?

If Jesus’ resurrection was both an assurance of his triumph over death and an ushering in of a new movement of shalom, that’s completely counter-cultural to a pop-art understanding of what it means to have new life after death. When figures come back from the dead in our contemporary stories, they generally do so to seek revenge…

Neville Kiser is a much applauded screenwriter in UCLA’s screenwriting program and a Brehm Center alumni. Listen in as Brehm Center Associate Director Nate Risdon talks with him about how he discerned his calling as a screenwriter.

How is it that we as viewers could also so disengaged from this tragedy, so “amoral” you might say? Did we even know it was going on? Recall an opening scene where a television journalist shows the hotel manager footage of a massacre he has shot blocks from the hotel. The journalist says, “If people see this footage, they’ll say, ‘Oh my God, that’s terrible,’ and they’ll go on eating their dinners.” And in fact, that is what we did…

Poverty, mercy, justice, and the movies.

I didn’t begin loving Vertigo until I was in high school. I think I was 17 or 18 before I actually understood even the basic foundation of the plot – that Madeline and Judy really are the same person. Looking back, I think what appealed to me was the idea of the Ideal Woman that so permeates this film…

So called “Christ-figures” permeate cinema, but ought we to so heavily one particular type of Christ figure over others? Listen in to hear our thoughts.

Because we are people with a confounding inconsistent preference for both the concrete and the abstract in stories, or a blend of the two, the best that modern day storytellers, that is the filmmakers, can hope for is that the audience will suspend disbelief, enter the story and actively seek to make meaning from what they have seen and heard…

While Spielberg and Lucas were wildly successful in creating one of cinema’s most loved heroes, I think they failed to create another version of James Bond. But they failed in the best possible way, because they created a character with real emotions who genuinely learns and grows as he is shaped by his adventures…

Cast your vote on which film better depicts Christian political enegagement – A Man For All Seasons or Footloose.