Christians are fond of rehearsing the story, told in Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings, of J.R.R. Tolkien nudging C.S. Lewis past the conversion tipping point with a well-timed comment about mythopoeia. When Lewis objected that other cultures and religions shared many mythic elements with Christianity, Tolkien Read More …
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 …
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 …
In 2022, I wrote that Dune takes the prompt of Luke 4:5-6 where the devil tempts Jesus and imagines a scenario in which a young prince might accept the devil’s temptation rather than reject it. This description is even more true of Dune: Part Two, Denis Villeneuve’s magnificent Read More …
Empowering movies about women don’t have to tell stories about women overcoming circumstances, oppression, or violence; the most empowering narrative is often about overcoming ourselves. Queen of Katwe was one of the most effective feminist films of the year, recounting the true story of Phiona Mutesi, a Read More …
Famously made for under $10,000 in the early 1970s, Charles Burnett’s portrait of life in Watts never received a commercial release due to legal issues surrounding its use of music. But it was eventually chosen by the Library of Congress to be preserved in the Read More …
What the Dardenne brothers do best is this: look at that person you’d rather not notice — the woman weeping on the subway, the guy pulling some shady deal on the corner — and take a deep dive into where she came from and where Read More …
In his most recent film, director Pawel Pawlikowski grapples with belief, loss, and religious ambiguity in 1960s Communist Poland. The story’s protagonist, a novitiate nun named Anna, is suddenly faced with a crisis of faith when she learns of her family’s dark history. Submersion in Read More …
“Would you like a drink?” What might you say to the man who killed your three children? What could you imagine him saying in reply? The second of two films on our list about grieving parents, Blake Robbins’s The Sublime and Beautiful takes a premise Read More …