Look, it’s not like The Hobbit is Holy Scripture. It’s not even, last I checked, part of the Apocrypha. It seems to me that the standard for judging Peter Jackson’s film rendition, then, ought to be whether it succeeds as art, rather than its faithfulness to Tolkien’s book. If we view the film as an …
Listening to a local film critic’s tired dismissal of the new film, Edge of Darkness, I was struck by the need, in film, literary, and art criticism just as much as in theological or architectural or epicurean criticism, for a foundational sense of what makes something good. All else flows from that. For some critics, this …
I’m pretty sure that somewhere in the unofficial New Yorker film critic handbook there’s a rule that goes something like this: If Christian faith is central to a film, don’t be afraid to stoop to name-calling and character assassination. Thus it wasn’t surprising to see in what manner David Denby unleashes his ire on The …
Perhaps you’ve seen commercials for the movie Legion, which appears to be two very different movies, depending on whether you’ve seen it advertised in the theater or on your television. On television, the premise appears to be that a host of demons has possessed townspeople, who must now be fended off by the inevitable rag-tag …
It’s accepted American wisdom now that smart people are not to be trusted. Thus our presidential candidates sprinkle the occasional “ain’t” when speaking to the little people, and strive to project the image of someone who did not spend his formative years in prep school. And everyone knows it’s a sure-fire formula in action film-making …
I confess that I’m not a French movie buff. I’ve never seen La Veuve de Saint-Pierre or Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge. I never bothered with The English Patient, for that matter, or Chocolat. For all I know, Juliette Binoche was brilliant in each of these films. Asking her to play opposite Steve Carell and …
I don’t know what film-school genius is teaching his students to use handheld cameras in lieu of stationary shots, but once the dizziness fades I’m going to track him down and beat him to death with his seldom-used tripod. The litany of errors that ultimately makes Hancock a disappointment includes the apparent employment of someone’s …
The opposition that fussy Christians voice toward Juno seems to boil down to the fact that it is filled with sinful people who live, think, and speak like sinners. Then again, this used to be true of the Church, at least until recent times. The fussy Christians seem to want morality plays in place of …
The mistake people make about modernism is thinking it’s old-fashioned. Thus a movie like Vantage Point comes along, built around the premise that it will be clever to show the same events through several characters’ eyes, and people call it “postmodern” because it’s, well, so very different. We are accustomed to being omniscient observers, or …
