Few religious dramas have been met with as much contention and protest as Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Based on the 1955 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, the film’s unorthodox portrayal of Jesus Christ (Willem Dafoe) and his battle with various forms of temptation Read More …
Signs came out during a precarious moment of cinematic history in the sometimes-fraught relationship between communities of faith and Hollywood. Following the release of The Last Temptation of Christ, a movie which critics loved and the Church at large hated, movies that openly addressed topics Read More …
Your conception of the afterlife is put on the witness stand in this 1946 classic. We follow pilot Peter Carter as an oversight of cosmic bureaucracy leaves his soul in a tug of war between a sudden romance on earth and his eternal destination in Read More …
“Well, Paterson. How’s life doin’ you?” “Uh, no complaints. You?” What is “the good life”? It’s a question that has occupied humans in every age. To answer it, we create stories and proverbs that warn of the perils of poor choices and encourage us toward Read More …
This commercial dog is not going to ruin my Christmas. A Charlie Brown Christmas premiered on CBS on December 9, 1965, and every year since, it has continued to welcome viewers into twenty-five minutes of the cool sounds of Vince Guaraldi’s music, the vivid colors Read More …
What makes Solomon Northrup a painfully effective avatar through which the modern viewer can experience slavery is that, like almost all of us, he was not born into it. A free man of color living in New York, he takes a job as a musician Read More …
Based on Ernest Gordon’s Through the Valley of the Kwai (which also served as a basis for Lean’s The Bridge over the River Kwai), To End All Wars directly engages the spiritual battles faced by Japanese prisoners of war. The film asks–in the most extreme of examples–what forgiveness really means Read More …
Like the Bible itself, Franco Zeffirelli’s epic, ambitious made-for-television Jesus of Nazareth is often experienced in bits and pieces over the years, and is commonly better known in isolated parts than in its lengthy whole. Viewed as a whole, Jesus of Nazareth may or may not be the best Read More …
Set in the early 1970s on the north coast of Scotland, Breaking the Waves nevertheless feels strangely timeless. With its bleak backdrop and its puritanical locals—who attend fire-and-brimstone sermons, of course—it recalls the stark environs of Carl Dreyer’s films. When Bess, a woman of what seems Read More …
