Film
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Joy is the dominant emotion of Inside Out—that’s Joy with a capital J, the first-among-supposed-equals struggling for the heart, and soul, of the lovely little heroine at the center of Pixar’s latest masterpiece of animation.
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June 22-29, 2015
If you asked 100 people to name the biggest Christian movie or television show in the last year, many would probably name “A.D.”, NBC’s miniseries about the birth of Christianity after the Passion. Others might mention “St. Vincent,” last fall’s Bill Murray vehicle about a misanthrope with a kind heart, or “Heaven Is for Real,” the 2014 film based on the bestselling book of the same name about a little boy who has a near-death experience.
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May 25-June 1, 2015
The very unwelcoming wasteland of wind, ice and snow we see at the beginning of Claudia Llosa’s enigmatic Aloft speaks eloquently about silence. Nature is frightening because it is mute. It offers no mitigating explanations for its ferocity. And such apparent disinterest can seem awful, especially to a human race that tends to take things personally.
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May 4, 2015
In the last five years, four of the five Oscar winners for Best Picture were films based on true stories, otherwise known as biopics. This year alone, four of the eight contenders in this category came from biopics, as did four of the five Best Actors and two Best Actresses. In fact, every year since 2003 either the Best Actor or Best Actress (and sometimes both) has been awarded to a performer in a film based on a true story.
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April 6, 2015
Hell. Not a location we care to dwell in, though dwelling on it has occupied no small amount of time, or words, or dreadful words, since poets started studying perdition. Dante, most famously and with an immortal amount of detail, described nine circles of calibrated agony, advising the hell-bound to abandon all hope.
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March 16, 2015
Imagine the climate-change debate as a Wagnerian opera, and what we are hearing now—as Pope Francis prepares his encyclical on the environment—is the overture: the rising and swelling of clangorous themes and motifs, i.e., talking points, about a socialist pope and a leftist church, all of which will set the stage for a full-throated assault on the integrity of the papacy, a chorus of faux-theological rebukes, Rick Santorum carrying a spear and, ultimately...
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“Anything can happen in the woods,” sings Prince Charming in the lavish adaptation of the multi-award winning Broadway hit, Into the Woods.
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January 19-26, 2015
The making of a movie like Selma—director Ava DuVernay’s powerful portrayal of the mid-’60s civil rights protests that helped changed the mind of a president and a nation—constitutes that rare thing, the no-lose/no-win situation. When the subject is as near-saintly as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a filmmaker, even if she wanted to, could not escape a certain amount of reflected glory. At the same time, when the subject is as near-saintly as the Rev....
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December 22-29, 2014
While Jesus spent 40 days and nights in the wilderness, Reese Witherspoon spends about three months there in Wild as the self-flagellating author Cheryl Strayed, albeit with a nylon tent, gas stove, water-purification tablets, James Michener paperbacks and a paralyzing aversion to serpents. Mortification of the flesh is one thing. Cold/hunger/boredom is quite another.
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December 1, 2014
The struggle to form and sustain relationships is a universal experience. The struggle to understand the existence of black holes, less so. So it makes sense that The Theory of Everything, a new biopic about Stephen Hawking, the physicist and cosmologist, puts more focus on his love life than on the scientific theories that made him famous.