Older Films

The Importance of Being Poppy : Happy-Go-Lucky

The opening scene of Mike Leigh’s shamefully overlooked Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) is a master class in establishing a character. Poppy, one of the great female characters in cinema, is introduced riding her bike. Her course is a wobbly wheeled delight, she’s dressed eccentrically and smiles frequently, but what is most noticeable is her full-eyed wonder, her […]
Rich Hill: A Look at Poverty Before It was a Statistic

Before the collapse of industrial empires like Detroit, there was rural America. And rural poverty has been forgotten for much longer than the most excessive architectural subjects of ruin pornography have existed. Andrew Droz Palmero and Tracy Droz Targos’s Sundance documentary, Rich Hill, is a reminder of a whole culture that is rarely found in […]
Chantal Akerman’s News From Home

I write this on a train, returning home after four days in New York City. In the last five years, I have toured three high school classes through the Metropolitan, the Cloisters, and the smaller museums of Manhattan, like the Morgan and the Frick. While El Greco and Fra Angelico’s Adoration scenes are true and […]
Defying The Elder Zosima: Going Clear

Before Orthodox Christians receive the Eucharist, they confess, “Of Thy Mystical Supper, O Son of God, accept me today as a communicant; for I will not speak of Thy Mystery to Thine enemies, neither like Judas will I give Thee a kiss; but like the thief will I confess Thee: Remember me, O Lord in […]
Mercy Rule: Ice Cream For Your Darlings

Praising Mercy Rule for what it doesn’t get wrong is a fairly straight forward task. Praising the film for what it gets right is a bit trickier. As with most “Christian films,” Mercy Rule was shot on a small budget and with few recognizable faces, though the film lacks an altar call, a conversion and […]
The Americans: The Best Show on Television

The German philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, in effort to show the pervasiveness of Christ’s Crucifixion in culture and as an axiom in social life, used the “Cross of Reality” to describe the suffering at the center of human experience. An actual Cross is key, not just as a symbol of anguish, but in form. Life does […]
What Kind Of A Man Are You?

Speaking of his wife and her brawny boss who is over for dinner, small town barber Ed Crane looks at the two flirting in his kitchen and remarks dryly to us, “I guess Doris liked all that he-man stuff. Sometimes I had the feeling that she and Big Dave were a lot closer than they […]
Full of Rag Water and Bitters: Blue Ruin

You’re full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin and you spill out -Tom Waits, 9th & Hennepin The star-crossed lovers are dead when the movie begins.There was a story of love, adultery and murder left aside. There were years of trauma skipped over, the dissolution of one family and the rallying and recovery of […]
Defect & Exile: The Hunt For Red October

I revisited The Hunt For Red October recently and found it a far different film than I remembered. I saw this one in the theater when I was nine and revisited it more than a dozen times in my teens, though I had not seen it in a decade when I started it a few nights ago. […]
American Sniper: The Shot Heard Round the World

When it comes to making heroes from rogues and outcasts, Americans (and Texans in particular) are incredible alchemists. William Travis was a debtor, Jim Bowie a slaver and James Bonham a convict, but that is not what any of them are remembered for. And, despite their faults, the world has found incredible use for such […]
Red Hook Summer

“We live in a world of should-not-be.” Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer (2012) is the story of Silas “Flik” Royale, a thirteen-year-old African-American boy from Atlanta who is sent to live with his “old school” preacher grandfather Bishop Enoch in the Brooklyn projects for the summer. Although we don’t really know the reasoning behind this […]
Where the Wild Things Are: Put Off All Your Beast

“Inside all of us is a Wild Thing,” goes the tagline to Spike Jonze’s 2009 film Where the Wild Things Are, based on the popular children’s book by Maurice Sendak and Max is the wildest of the wild, son and younger brother in a broken family. Jonze with co-adapter Dave Eggers craft a touching film […]
Children of Men: Rachel Weeping In The 21st Century

A little less than a decade back, the greatest Christmas movie of all time came and went with disappointingly little fanfare— I say “disappointingly little” despite the fact two dozen top American film critics put it in their top ten lists at the end of the year. A few of their reviews dabbled in the […]
Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder: The Place Beyond the Pines

“He’s my son and I should be around him. I wasn’t around my dad and look at the… way I turned out.” The film opens with the speaker, Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), shirtless and bedecked with a tattoo scheme in which White Chocolate likely served as inspiration. He paces about a small utility room twirling and […]
Dumb And Dumber: Angel Beasts In The House Of Mirth

Let me start by getting myself into a little trouble. I think the best comedy is offensive. I think comedy is, by definition, a kind of offense. Occasionally, people say to me, “I know of this really funny comedian. He’s not dirty at all. Very clean, but very funny.” I have yet to find this […]
Barefoot in Church: Ragamuffin

Most Christians who grew up in the 90s or before know Rich Mullins as the musician who wrote “Awesome God,” but his life was much darker than his most popular song would suggest. Mullins was an ascetic, even a rebel. He trashed phone booths and drank and went barefoot in church. He may have even smoked […]
A Simple Plan

“The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist,” writes Baudelaire. It is the greatest trick of modernity, beginning with the Enlightenment, as well. And, if the various modern social projects from capitalism to communism had anything in common, it was their motivation to convince all of us that […]
Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas

Having spent the last several days reading reviews of Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas, and now sitting down to write my own take, I am reminded of the 2000 presidential election in which both Bush and Gore hired teams of lawyers to sue one another over the results before the votes were even cast. Saving Christmas […]
Ace in the Hole

When Chuck Tatum rolls into Albuquerque, his busted car is being towed to a mechanic, but he is nonetheless behind the wheel, casually reading a newspaper. A bemused, smug expression Tatum wears suggests he is enjoying the ride. I could get used to this. Something is broken, but that brokenness has made his life a little […]
The Mosquito Coast: The Origins of Totalitarianism

Quite a few more people have seen Peter Weir’s Witness than his The Mosquito Coast. Perhaps, this is because watching a movie about the charms of tradition is easier than watching one about the terrors of modernity. But both are messages that we need to hear. After all, being wise as a serpent is as much an injunction as being innocent as a dove.