The Lord’s Prayer? Sacramental marriage? New life? Death and resurrection? This movie’s Snow White is clearly meant to be Christian…
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The romance of Sam and Suzy churns up all sorts of latent conflicts between the people in their lives. Wes Anderson’s movies are frequently about disparate people in close proximity who are nonetheless emotionally distant from one another. Through the havoc of the movie’s narrative, they are brought together into a new kind of humorous and hard won solidarity…
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I’ve seen over 50 films in 2012 thus far and The Kid with a Bike sits at the top of them all. It’s production is as simple as its title, which brilliantly creates the space the audience needs to process the complexity of what it means to be human. As much as this is a story of perpetual abandonment, it is a story of persistent grace and acceptance…
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Men in Black 3 is actually pretty good. Considering the budget, the production problems, and the decade-long lapse between this movie and its immediately preceding – and memorably disappointing – prequel, some might call its quality miraculous. I wouldn’t. I put a different price tag on my miracles…
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This makes movies potentially profoundly transformative, because shared memory is integral in our fight against injustice, oppression, and suffering in the world. Movies, given their resemblance to memory and communal nature, are potentially more powerful than even direct, person to person accounts of victims’ stories in garnering empathy and solidarity…
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Saddam Hussein was the world’s enemy for many, many reasons. Allowing that he was as deserving of death as any tyrant on the planet, the world missed an opportunity to love its enemy, to extend grace and mercy and forgiveness to a man who needed grace and mercy and forgiveness…
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Bernie is a movie that questions our ideas of mercy and justice. Is murder ever justified? Should a person be allowed mercy by his or her peers if they too despised the person he or she killed? What proves a person’s character – his or her numerous graces or his or her one, unavoidable sin?
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This movie is ever evolving. Every time I watch it, something new speaks to my soul. No matter what part of the journey I am in lately in my life, there is a scene, quote, or conversation that hits me to the core. It’s as though God is telling me something about my life that I need to hear at that moment. The Divine is bringing me to these examples to encourage me, to get me through tough times…
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A common theme has been found in all of the movies nominated for Best Picture this past year. Hugo and The Tree of Life further help us deal with change and loss.
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In 2008, when Disney/Pixar released Wall-E, I had no idea that this film would affect my life is such a great way. It not only gave me hope for the science-fiction genre, but also showed me how much can be said by saying very little.
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The Avengers is as charming, exciting, funny, visually stunning, and involving as its predecessors, but no more so. The Avengers is equal to its antecedents, but it is not greater than them.
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Like The Artist, Oscar nominees Moneyball and The Descendents both offer hope in uncertain times of great change…
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With much of what we do obsolete before we are ready to quit, we, like George, fear the future, while hoping for the best. We hope, against hope, that there is the equivalent of a dance musical in our future. And if only for a moment in the movie theater, The Artist gives us that hope…
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The Raid: Redemption is being hailed as the best action movie in years, and it is subtitled “Redemption.” Is either epigram appropriate?
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Kinyarwanda and The Redemption of General Butt Naked, seen in tandem, pack a powerful one-two punch. They have a lot in common: both are films about recent African civil wars, both deal with post-conflict reconciliation, and both dare to suggest the possibility of redemption for even the worst offenders. However, Kinyarwanda, unlike Butt Naked, in an ensemble film, and the ensemble form is ideally suited to dealing with the issue of forgiveness in communal settings..
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At the end of the one hundred and seven minute film, I felt resolved and strong. I knew everything I did affected other people. I was determined to give up the rat-race, fight through the confusion, and find inner peace and a man who “likes the bonnet” on the other side…
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In many ways, it’s not the obvious action or drama that drives the story’s tension, It’s the inevitability of the mundane. Through suggestive imagery and patient dialogue, Farhardi focuses intently on the ordinary moments…
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Maybe the most interesting thing about this movie is not actually the movie, but the world created around it to get it into theaters. This project died a million deaths in a thousand days…
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The movie avoids sentimentality by counterbalancing its religious themes with reasonably candid depictions of less sanitary college antics. Although tame by mainstream standards, the lack of puritanical squeamishness over content typical of Christian movies is refreshing, and it’s long overdue for a generation of evangelicals who, for better or for worse, mostly don’t adhere to rigorous standards of content…
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As I watched Magnolia, there were times when I felt overwhelmed, scared, sad, and most of all… just downright filthy, particularly as I found myself relating and empathizing with the characters…
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So what is Once Upon a Time? Is it a myth, a fairy tale meant to comfort us, the viewers, by showing us that poor mistreated young women can get the handsome prince to fall in love and rescue them from their unhappy situations? Is it a parable meant to show us that the myths cannot be real but that in truth young women have to make due for themselves? Perhaps it is both of these things at once…
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