Category: Film Reviews/Hollywood
Faith Lost and Found in “Ad Astra”
In his 2006 Wired essay, “The Church of the Non-Believers,” journalist Gary Wolf coined the term “New Atheists” to describe the intellectual movement inaugurated by a quartet of thinkers who pressed for a militant revival of Neo-Darwinism in the wake...
Time is Always Time: Christopher Nolan, T. S. Eliot, and Creatureliness
As one of very few directors billed above his stars, Christopher Nolan was almost in with a shout at reviving post-lockdown cinema. As it turned out, the late August release of Tenet was the last gasp off an overly-optimistic pandemic...
Lady Bird and the Buffered Self
“Do I look like I’m from Sacramento?” “You are from Sacramento.” Greta Gerwig’s 2018 film Lady Bird explores the relationship between identity, freedom, and givenness with painstaking attention to mundane details. An homage to her hometown of Sacramento, California, the...
The (Latest) Modern Prometheus: Intergenerational Breakdown in The Lighthouse
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders...
A Hidden Life According to Neil Postman
What is it that makes Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life so starkly unique and beautifully profound? To answer this question, let’s start by considering literature. Great literature attempts to encapsulate the beauty and hardship of life and its relation to...
Confusing the Substance and Accidents of Star Wars
The recent, and last, installment of the Star Wars Episodic saga, The Rise of Skywalker, is alive on the silver screen. The film opened to a successful $176.5 million (75 million less than The Force Awakens, mind you) and is...
A Hidden Life as Temptation Narrative
How do we live when nobody is looking, or when the collateral damage of pursuing good might outweigh complicity in evil? Terrence Malick’s film A Hidden Life is based upon the true story of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian peasant who...
The Joke’s on You: Why Leviathan Needs Joker
As men require a heaping dose of dreams to reconcile themselves to waking life, so too does the hulking Leviathan of society require its dreams—which are films. This fantastical notion—that films function as society’s dreams—was first heralded by a smattering...
The Toxic Environments of First Reformed
Michael Mensana is in despair. The world is coming to an end, and there is nothing any of us can do about it. Here is the timeline. Here is the graph of the inevitable, the coming judgement. What kind of...
Movie Review: A Quiet Place
By Brewer Eberly It’s difficult to be silent about A Quiet Place—Paramount’s recent creature-feature directed by and starring John Krasinski (yes, Jim Halpert from The Office) and his wife, Emily Blunt (Sicario, Edge of Tomorrow, The Devil Wears Prada). A...