Category: Film Reviews/Hollywood
Orthodox Beauty in the Face of Religious Abuse: Women Talking’s Generous Depiction of Christianity
If there were an award for getting audiences to live out the title of a film, Sarah Polley’s Women Talking would win in a landslide. The recent Academy Award winner for Best Adapted Screenplay has accomplished what good film–and good...
No Dust on Me
The third season of His Dark Materials, the television adaptation of British fantasy writer Philip Pullman’s popular trilogy, wrapped up this winter. While the show, airing on the BBC in the UK and on HBO internationally, was looked to as...
Finding Redemption through Recurring Love in “Groundhog Day”
I made the mistake of watching Groundhog Day for the first time during the summer I was studying for the bar exam. I was trapped in the living nightmare of studying the same material, every day, with seemingly no end...
In the Perilous Realm: Tradition and Memory in “The Rings of Power”
At the waning of the year, looking ahead to the blaze of Christmas, I’ve been reexamining Amazon’s adventures in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium. The first season of The Rings of Power was a moral muddle, but the story was strongest when...
Something Essential Abides
Movies on the multiverse have some serious advantages over their single-world brethren when it comes to entertainment value. Once a creator admits into his work the idea that our universe is only one among many, literally limitless possibility opens up...
Sons and Daughters
When philosopher Umberto Galimberti began working as a psychoanalyst in 1979, his patients’ problems “were grounded in emotions, feelings, and sexuality. Now,” however, “they concern the void of meaning.” According to Galimberti, young people are plagued by a sense of...
The Danger of Respectable Christianity
Since its first season premiered on Netflix in 2016, The Crown has garnered attention from viewers, critics, and from the members of the royal family whose lives it portrays. The series’ fourth season, which was released late last year, has...
I Am a Unit of One
After Jiang Qing married Mao Zedong in 1938, Communist leadership informed her that to join the Communist movement, she would need to submit her will to a work unit. Qing, who before her marriage to Mao was an aspiring actress,...
The Promise and the Failure of WandaVision
This article references plot points from the full run of Wandavision. Superhero films are mass-casualty events. As the Marvel Cinematic Universe has grown, it’s success has won it a little more space to consider the griefs and resentments of the...
When Time Isn’t Time: Augustine on Tenet
The greatest living movie maker (Christopher Nolan), director of the greatest movie ever (The Prestige – we will have to discuss it another time), has done it again, though you would not know it if you relied on the popular...