Isn't that Special
The new animated film from DreamWorks, Kung Fu Panda, bumped Sex and the City from the top box-office spot last weekend and thus struck something of a blow for family-friendly films. Panda stars Jack...
View ArticleIt's Happened Again
In the wake of two flops -- The Village and Lady in the Water -- M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film, The Happening, is an attempt to return to the success of his early films -- The Sixth Sense,...
View ArticleGet Smart
As is the case with many remakes, the newly released Get Smart, starring Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart and Anne Hathaway as Agent 99, works better the less you know about the original series, which was...
View ArticleNot a Signature Role
The newly released Hancock features Will Smith as a homeless, drunken, and unpopular superhero whose exploits save human beings from dire situations -- but only at the cost of enormous destruction of...
View ArticleDerivative Bloodline
The new film Bloodlinefrom writer, director, and star investigator, Bruce Burgess -- whose credits include The Bermuda Triangle Solved -- purports to be an investigation of the most outlandish of the...
View ArticleCherchez la femme!
The new French film, Tell No One, is an understated thriller with echoes of The Fugitive and Vertigo. Of course, many French films are subdued and sophisticated, even as they eschew the American...
View ArticleVicky Cristina Barcelona
A reflection on the tensions between art and ordinary life, between romantic love and conventional marriage, Woody Allen’s latest film Vicky Cristina Barcelona is both a departure from his recent...
View ArticleUnder the Sea-quel
It’s a pity that theaters today don’t feature more films like The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning, Disney’s recent straight-to-DVD-release. Seeing it recently with my youngest daughter at an advanced...
View ArticleThe Angst of the Aging Lecher
In his essay, “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community,” Wendell Berry writes that the “voyeur cannot crack the shell”; to behold copulating bodies is not to capture sexual intimacy, the mysterious union...
View ArticleEducating Helen Keller
‘The world isn’t an easy place for anyone.I don’t want her just to obey, but to let her have her way in everything is a lie, to her,” says Anne Sullivan about her pupil, Helen Keller, in William...
View ArticleR. Polanski
In an on-camera interview, Roger Gunson -- the former L. A. District Attorney who in the 1970s prosecuted a sexual-assault case against famous filmmaker Roman Polanski -- remarks on the theme,...
View ArticleRouault as Modernist Christian Artist
In his recently published Modernism: The Lure of Heresy,Peter Gay defines that late-19th- and 20th-century movement in terms of religious heterodoxy and the practice of “principled self-scrutiny.”...
View ArticleA Less Than Merry Christmas Tale
The newly released French film, A Christmas Tale, is a holiday story of a family reunion. Starring Catherine Deneuve as Junon -- the matriarch of the Vuillard family -- the film features family...
View ArticleThankful for the NEA?
‘The Right viewed us as purveyors of smut and filth, while the Left saw us as the inept, but loveable, purveyors of smut and filth.” That is the humorous way in which Dana Gioia -- who recently...
View ArticleChoosers of the Slain
The latest Tom Cruise vehicle, Valkyrie, tells the story of the last of numerous German plots to remove Adolf Hitler from power and save Germany from international shame and ignominious defeat. Cruise...
View ArticlePitt the Younger
Opening on Christmas Day, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the result of an unexpected cinematic collaboration between scriptwriter Eric Roth, who penned Forrest Gump, and director David Fincher,...
View ArticleStreep Amidst the Wolves
The film version of Doubt, directed by John Patrick Shanley and based on his celebrated play, is set in a Catholic parish in the Bronx in 1964. At the center of the plot are two characters: the tough...
View ArticleLittle Children
Sam Mendes’s new film, Revolutionary Road, reprises themes from his celebrated American Beauty and reunites the stars of Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. (Winslet has already won both a...
View ArticleNo Country for Good Men
The new Italian film Gomorrah, directed by Matteo Garrone, is an unflinching and unromantic look at the story of the Camorra -- the crime syndicate, operative in Naples and Caserta, that is responsible...
View ArticleResurrecting Films
To’our bodies turne wee then, that so Weake men on love reveal’d may looke;Loves mysteries in soules doe grow, But yet the body is his booke.John Donne, “The Exstasie” Carl Theodor Dreyer, director...
View ArticleA Life of Faith and Reason
On April 15, Tom Dillon, president of Thomas Aquinas College (TAC) in Santa Paula, Calif., died in a car accident in Ireland. The college’s second president, after Ronald McArthur, Dillon took office...
View ArticleInspiring Witness, Inspiring Testimony
‘God wants it, so I accept it.” The words of Pope John Paul II, from the newly released DVD Testimony: The Untold Story of Pope John Paul II, express his attitude toward suffering and physical...
View ArticleAngels, Demons, Hanks & Hokum
In his mid-20th-century autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton, who eventually became a Trappist monk, describes a trip to Rome before his conversion. Having exhausted himself as a...
View ArticleReprise of the Machines
The great science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, whose books were the basis for Blade Runner and Minority Report, wrote:Within the universe there exist fierce cold things [machines]. Their behavior...
View ArticleForward to the Past
The new French film Summer Hours is a small film, without much in the way of action, but it is a beautiful film nonetheless, not only because of Eric Gautier’s sumptuous cinematography but also because...
View ArticleJohn Dillinger, Existentialist
At the end of the new Michael Mann film, Public Enemies, John Dillinger sits in the Biograph Theater in Chicago watching a gangster film, Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable. The Gable character...
View ArticleVatican Intrigue
‘I know. I know. It sounds like a bad movie starring Tom Hanks.” That is the observation of a character in Ralph McInerny’s latest mystery novel, The Third Revelation, about the behind-the-scenes story...
View ArticleThe Horcrux of the Matter
‘Oh, to be young and feel love’s keen sting,” is Professor Albus Dumbledore’s wry comment on the wrenching pains of puppy love that his Hogwarts students are suffering in Harry Potter and the...
View ArticleWhen Art Matters
An exhibit now on display in the new home of the Jewish Contemporary Museum in San Francisco focuses on the little-known and short-lived period just after the Russian Revolution during which Jewish...
View ArticleHalf Bad
Midway through the new Judd Apatow film, Funny People, Eminem in a cameo appearance admonishes a leukemia-suffering George Simmons (Adam Sandler): Your best move would simply be to die. Apatow might...
View ArticleHigh School Rock Musical
The new Walden Media production, Bandslam, is for the most part an entertaining story about the new kid in town, Will Burton (Gaelan Connell), a classic-rock purist and typical loner who suddenly finds...
View ArticleWho Is Don Draper?
‘I keep going different places, and always winding up where I’ve already been.” That is a comment by Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the main character of the critically acclaimed AMC series Mad Men, in its...
View ArticleFame Fizzles
In an early scene in Fame, director Kevin Tancharoen’s remake of the Oscar-winning film from 1980, students who have made the cut for entrance into the highly selective New York City High School of...
View ArticleInflated Hopes
Director Cedric Klapisch’s new film, Paris, begins with young girls looking out over the City of Light and asking their mother, “Where is the universe?” She responds, “Everywhere.” But for the city...
View ArticleHeld by the Past
‘So, who are you supposed to be?” a man asks Don Draper on Halloween night as he and his wife, Betty, take their children trick-or-treating. That of course is the abiding question of the critically...
View ArticleJust Bite Her Already
If Elvis and Christopher Walken had a son, he would look like Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), the dreamy-eyed vampire in Chris Weitz’s film The Twilight Saga: New Moon. The much-anticipated film is a...
View ArticleFrom the Projects to the Ravens
The Blind Side is the true story of the high-school years of Baltimore Ravens lineman Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), who was born in a Memphis housing project with no father and a drug-addicted mother....
View ArticlePerpetual Motion
Pascal once observed that, in the absence of a framing purpose for human life, the best life was one with access to a host of diversions. Moving its denizens from one diversion to another, modern...
View ArticleAvatar on Earth Day
James Cameron’s record-shattering film Avatar is being released on DVD today. Today is not a Tuesday, the day DVDs normally hit the stores, but a Thursday, to coincide with the 40th annual Earth Day:...
View ArticleThe Sci-Fi as Rom-Com
The new film The Adjustment Bureau, written and directed by George Nolfi, features Matt Damon as David Norris, a politician whose chance encounter with Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt) complicates not only...
View ArticleFor the Love of God and Men
Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men is a French-language film based on the true story of the martyrdom of Catholic monks in Algiers in the 1990s. The Cistercian monks, who had lived peaceably serving a...
View ArticleMidnight in Paris
Woody Allen’s new film, Midnight in Paris, is a marked improvement over recent failures such as Whatever Works and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which Allen indulged in strident liberal...
View ArticleMemento Harry
Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers.There has never been anything quite like J. K Rowling’s Harry Potter, the hero of a hugely popular series of seven books followed by a successful set of...
View ArticleOscar Nominations: The Year of Sentimental Populism
What an unusual list of Oscar nominees for Best Picture -- sentimental and populist. Among the nominated films, there are no movies with big social or political statements, nor are there the usual...
View ArticleOscar Surprises
What an unusual list of Oscar nominees for Best Picture -- sentimental and populist. Among the nominated films, there are no movies making big social or political statements, nor are there the usual...
View ArticleWhat College Women Want
Damsels in Distress, Whit Stillman’s first film since 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, focuses on the lives of a group of co-eds at a fictional East Coast college that is dominated by a boorish and...
View ArticleThe Dark Knight Rises
Christopher Nolan’s final entry in his trilogy of Batman movies, The Dark Knight Rises, contains less humor, fewer moments of awe-inspiring action, and a much less captivating villain than either of...
View ArticleA Wonderful Life
At one point during Terry Teachout’s play Satchmo at the Waldorf, the character of Louis Armstrong, performed by the accomplished stage and screen actor John Douglas Thompson, talks about his...
View ArticleAn Unexpected Interpretation
For viewers who were enthralled by Peter Jackson’s majestic films of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, watching the first installment (of three) of Jackson’s version of The Hobbit is likely to be equal...
View ArticleA Heartening Oscar Crop
‘People need dramatic examples. . . . As a man I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol, I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.” That’s a line spoken by Bruce...
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