New on DVD / Bluray
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God’s Not Dead 2: First World Problems (PG)
If courage is a mark of greatness in film making, God’s Not Dead 2 is deserving of more than a few laurels. It takes real guts to give a movie called God’s Not Dead 2 a theatrical release date of April 1st. If the release date is analogous to riding a motorcycle without a helmet, […]
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Beyond the Mask: Parable or Fluff Film? (PG)
Some stories shun a theme or philosophy or moral—they are meant purely for enjoyment. No one gets much moral edification from The Three Musketeers, but it remains a classic because we enjoy reading it. Die Hard has remained popular not because of any deep and lasting truths, but because it’s macho eye candy. These movies […]
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Judging Your Neighbor : Two Days, One Night (PG-13)
Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, the Belgian co-directors of Two Days, One Night, capture the spirit of a modern day Dickens, but without the maudlin Victorianism. The Belgian natives stick to the lower class in their films using a documentarian hand-held camera; frequently using available light, unknown actors, eschewing soundtracks, tracking shots and big budgets, […]
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Jupiter Ascending: Descent to Some Kind of Love (PG-13)
Conjure, if you will, a moving image of the hippest rollerblader you’ve ever seen. If you are strapped for stock images, try the reuniting-the-team segment at the front end of D2: The Mighty Ducks, or some other nineties vintage of the same ilk. Now, hoist that rollerblader twenty, thirty, a thousand feet into air—the same […]
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Song of the Sea (PG)
The first words of the Tomm Moore’s Song of the Sea are a quotation from Yeats’ poem “The Stolen Child”: Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand. For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. In the poem, a group of fairies […]
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Holy Satire: Believe Me (PG-13)
God created satire. At the end of Job—the oldest book of the Bible—God answers Job’s bitter questions with a set of his own humorous, unanswerable queries. In Isaiah and Jeremiah, God mocks idolaters by describing how useless it is to expect anything from a god made with your own hands. Humor ideally brings out the […]
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Song of the Sea (PG)
Come away, O human child To the waters and the wild With a fairy, hand in hand For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. This quote from Yeats fittingly opens Tomm Moore’s Song of the Sea, which seeks to understand a world full of weeping through the eyes of a human […]
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Welcoming the Masses?: The Good Lie (PG-13)
The beginning of The Good Lie plays like a documentary. Sudanese children frolic in a close-knit village, their words translated on the bottom of the screen. Two brothers play a game to memorize the names of their ancestors, and they tend their village’s cattle herds together. Suddenly, a troop of Northern Sudanese fighters brutally massacres […]
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Locke (R)
In The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun, Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy suggests that if you want to know a man, you have to talk to him on the drive to work. The Modern world has drawn thick, heavy lines between the home and the workplace, dividing a man’s livelihood from his bedroom, his office from […]
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The Fault In Our Stars (PG-13)
The memento mori (“remember you will die”) is a significant part of Puritan spirituality as well as the monastic life. The benefits of reminding yourself that you will die is written into numerous ascetic prayers and the “Dialog Between Christ, A Youth and the Devil” which concludes The New England Primer both draw heavily on […]
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Only Lovers Left Alive (R)
Only Lovers Left Alive is a my-favorite-things picture from independent film director Jim Jarmusch. It is a Dutch still life painting, though the fruit has been substituted with the prized possessions of the artist. It is a film filled with cool and dark things, like dirty rock and roll, night drives, death, Nikola Tesla, sunglasses, […]
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Divergent (PG-13)
Why do we eat candy canes at Christmas? Why are they red and white? Why do we fold our hands to pray? If you ask a child these questions, they often offer an acrobatic answer. By the time they enter middle school, at least in this day and age, the answers become less and less […]
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Enemy (R)
Encountering a double, or doppelganger, is an ancient fear with long literary credentials. There’s something primeval about it, the pagan myths are replete with twins, both evil and otherwise, and the Bible has some very famous twins of its own (Jacob and Esau being the primary example), but perhaps the one that connects most readily […]
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Stalingrad (R)
When we were discussing Stalingrad, a friend referred to it as “Saving Comrade Katya.” To an extent, his comparison to Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan works. Both are violent films set in turning points of World War II, both focus on a small group of soldiers, and both attempt to depict the war’s brutality while maintaining […]
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Inside Llewyn Davis (R)
“Hang me, oh, hang me,” sings Llewyn Davis mournfully in the opening scene of Joel and Ethan Coen’s newest film, Inside Llewyn Davis. It’s an appropriately melancholy choice, slyly setting up the film’s abundant use of gallows humor and the travails a hapless protagonist will face. Inside Llewyn Davis follows a week in the life of its struggling […]
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Hours (PG-13)
Low-budget, independent films require a few important things to engross an audience. Since they do not have the budget of a blockbuster, they rely heavily on the script and the actors. In theory, Hours should have had both. In practice, it had neither. Our story opens on a soon-to-be father and mother entering a hospital […]
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American Hustle (R)
It is possible to walk away from David O. Russell’s American Hustle with an unchallenged, unalloyed understanding of the word “American”— the quantity of leisure suits and Jersey accents alone put to rest any doubts about which America we’re dealing with. The same can’t be said of that other word, “hustle.” There is too much […]
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How I Live Now (R)
When I was still quite young, no more than ten or eleven, little excited my soul more than the sound of a fire alarm going off at school. We would exit the building quickly and stand in the parking lot, surveying the school. Someone would claim they saw smoke, and we would all say we […]
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Nebraska (R)
Alexander Payne, who is perhaps best known for moving the wine industry with his 2004 film Sideways, is well practiced in the Midwestern art of stoic disappointment. A son of the cornhusker state, Payne uses their quiet turmoil even when his films are set California and Hawaii as was Sideways and The Descendants, respectively.
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Much Ado About Nothing (2012) (PG-13)
“Shakespeare” is a word which likely conjures up an endless string of irrevocably poignant images, though the writer himself was directly responsible for none of them. I think of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and the battle on the beach, wherein Harold Perrineau’s tragically underestimated interpretation of Mercutio claims “A scratch!” after being mortally stabbed. […]