PAN'S LABYRINTH
Pan's Labyrinth runs under the tagline “Innocence has a power evil cannot
imagine,” but
happily Mr. del Toro labors at that truth with love,
teasing it out slowly, so
that finally we are compelled to do some
pretty heavy lifting if we want what
this piece is offering us
RAY
If you are like me and all you know about Ray
Charles going in is that
he was blind and smiled a lot when he played the piano,
I strongly urge
you to see this film.
SAVED!
When Hilary Faye (played by Mandy Moore), the most perfect and self-righteous
teenage Christian prom queen, gets her comeuppance in Saved!,
you don’t know
whether to applaud or feel a twinge of concern.
SEABISCUIT
Every now and then a big production movie comes along whose impact
outpaces all the pre-release hype that puts it prancing in the starting
gate.
The movie startles and carries you for a ride worth remembering,
if not taking
over and again. Seabiscuit is such a movie.
SHADOWLANDS
Shadowlands is a touching, intelligent film about Narnia’s
creator, C.
S.
Lewis, and his brief but tragic love affair with Joy Davidman
Gresham.
SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE
Something's Gotta Give, a lighthearted,
humorous depiction of
the dilemmas faced by two characters growing old in a
youth-oriented
culture, is good entertainment. And more.
THE CONSTANT GARDENER
In terms of decoding what is at first glance a rather unusual title, one of
the most poignant scenes in this film is a brief homemade video during
which
Tessa films her sleeping husband Justin—a British diplomat
stationed in Kenya—
while joking about how he is probably dreaming of a
"world without weeds."
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
As Benjamin Button, Brad Pitt portrays someone who lives his life backward, from old man to infant. The curious thing is what he learns along the way.
THE DA VINCI CODE
It’s a summer action flick—a slow-moving and garrulous one, to be sure, but no
more inherently plausible than when aliens attacked America ten summers
ago in
Independence Day.
THE GOLDEN COMPASS
With all the pre-emptive warnings that church groups circulated about The
Golden Compass—advising religious folk to stay away from
Christopher Weitz’s
adaptation of Philip Pullman’s first installment in
the “His Dark Materials”
trilogy—you’d think the film would be
more…relevant.
THE HUMAN(IZING) CHRIST OF FILM
Jesus' humanness has been portrayed in numerous ways in movies. Here Torey Lightcap takes a look at some of the more intriguing examples.
THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE
If you were a beaver and four humans showed up on your doorstep wearing fur
coats, would you let them in? I certainly would have second thoughts.
Funny how
that idea never occurred to me before, even though I’ve read
about the Pevensie
children’s first encounter with the talking beavers
of Narnia countless times.
THE MATRIX
My students often accuse me of madness, but they find nothing particularly
controversial in my observation that The Matrix powerfully names and describes
the forms of captivity into which we're born and within which we live and move
and, by all appearances, have our being.
THE MATRIX RELOADED
As Jada Pinkett Smith describes the Wachowski Brothers,
"They know how
to balance eye candy with deep thoughts."
THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS
The Matrix Revolutions makes you want to go back to the good old days
of
1999, when the first of these movies, The
Matrix, delivered so much and promised
so much more.
THE PIANIST
Many films explore the power of art to redeem human depravity, but none
with any more force than The Pianist.
THE SIMPSONS MOVIE
Can Homer, Bart and the rest of the animated cast really teach us anything about faith?
VIOLENT DUDS
We find these days that people don’t understand what it takes to present violence on film in ways that actually make us think or turn us to the good, and we’re left with the continuation of a grossly disturbing trend.
WORTH WATCHING: THE TRAIN
Its roots are in the conventions of the classic genre of the action film, but The Train is also a war movie and an ethical think-piece. And it’s this last element— the moral universe it inhabits —that can make this film so enticing to anyone on a spiritual journey.
