Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. is essential viewing because an unexamined faith is not a wellspring of beliefs, but a list on inclinations inscribed on a wet napkin. Following Abby Ryder Fortson (Ant-Man; A Dog’s Journey) as Margaret, the daughter of a Jewish man (Bennie Sadie — Read More …
Killers of the Flower Moon lays plain yet another appalling chapter of American history. The Reign of Terror in the 1920s saw the Osage people murdered by white people who felt the wealth from oil was their God-given right as the superior race. Apparently, they Read More …
The absolutely brilliant Paul Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, a cantankerous, foul-mouthed prep-school teacher, who is somewhat forced into taking care of a bunch of misfit students during winter break in Alexander Payne’s newest masterpiece The Holdovers. The film, which also stars Dominic Sessa as Angus Tully, Read More …
“You don’t get to commit the sin, then have us all feel sorry for you that it had consequences,” Kitty Oppenheimer reprimands her husband Robert midway through 2023’s Oppenheimer. For most of the film, J. Robert Oppenheimer leads the Manhattan Project without reserve, arguing the necessity Read More …
F for Fake is ostensibly a film about Elmyr de Hory, an art forger who produced paintings soseemingly authentic that they fooled the best art critics in the West. His paintings, director Orson Welles claims, are still featured in certain unnamed museums. The film also Read More …
Some topics — slavery, war, genocide — are so massive in scope that attempts to represent them in a single work of art risks coming across as … hubristic … naive …. maybe even scandalous. But it is the eternal struggle of art and artists Read More …
Money, not sex, is the great seducing idol of contemporary civilization. The most profound epiphany of Lauren Greenfield’s masterpiece is how often wealth and privilege weaken rather than empower us. What could easily have been a wry satire about excess begins with David and Jackie Read More …
Here is what most depictions of late-twentieth-century religion get wrong. They tend to try to frame the story of health-and-wealth gospels and televangelists within traditional, even ancient, tropes. The materialist Christians are swindlers or conmen, like Harry Powell (Night of the Hunter), Elmer Gantry, or Read More …
Despite its sobering themes, Hoop Dreams is a deeply inspiring film. The movie is ostensibly a documentary about two young men’s pipe dream to reach the NBA, but it’s really a movie about the importance of perseverance and faith in the face of adversity. Throughout Read More …
Like Leni Riefenstahl’s better-known Triumph of the Will, this is a war film commissioned by the director’s government. Unlike Riefenstahl, though, John Houston make a film the government didn’t care for, and Let There Be Light was suppressed for several decades. Its portrayal of Post Read More …