David Fincher’s films have always looked on the dark side, but there was something downright redemptive about his last film, The Game, in which a yuppie’s materialistic, spiritually moribund life is turned upside down by a mysterious organization. Fight Club, Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s hip existential novel about a cult of white-collar workers who […]
The Insider embodies clear moral vision
Entering the theatre, you pretty much know what to expect from The Insider. The latest film from Michael Mann is a dramatization of the events that led former tobacco-industry executive Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) to confess in a 60 Minutes interview that his company had knowingly made its cigarettes more addictive, only to see his […]
Christian Youth Scare Films : Preachy and Fake
Christian Youth Scare Films, Something Weird Video, 1996, 3 vols. Halloween is just a few weeks away, so it may be a perfect time to take a look at Christian Youth Scare Films, a three-volume collection of religious films for teens produced during the Eisenhower years. The series is distributed by Something Weird, a Seattle-based […]
Jakob the Liar
Jakob’s lies contain some truth The first time I saw the trailer for Jakob the Liar, it was immediately followed by an ad for The Insider. The two both focused on issues of truth and deceit, and they could not have been more opposite. Jakob the Liar is an adaptation of Jurek Becker’s novel about […]
Central Station paints touching portrait of grace
Brazil has some of the most heavily populated cities in the world. It is also currently home to one of the largest religious revivals on the world. Central Station, the new film from Brazilian director Walter Salles, tells a familiar story — an old, cynical woman finds herself looking after a young boy and, in […]
Apostle: Duvall’s work flawed, yet convincing
Thanks to the usual vagaries of independent film distribution, The Apostle, a $5 million labor of love written and directed by Robert Duvall, opened in Canadian theatres some months after its premiere in the United States. But now that it’s here, Canadians can join their American counterparts in pondering the question: Who do men say […]
Amistad
Spielberg’s story of slaves recognizes the role of religion FEW WOULD deny that Hollywood movies exert a powerful homogenizing force on society. For whatever reason, filmmakers have traditionally toed a line that favors a secular, white point of view. Nowhere is this more apparent than in films about North American race relations: films such as […]
How much like robots are we?
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control proves, once again, that Errol Morris is one of the today’s most fascinating filmmakers. His newest documentary does not have the celebrity appeal of his Stephen Hawking bio A Brief History of Time, nor will it make headlines like The Thin Blue Line, which singlehandedly overturned an innocent man’s […]
Anastasia & FairyTale
In addition to the social and political havoc it caused, the First World War precipitated a sort of spiritual crisis. In a world rapidly giving in to industrialism and modernization, the war proved that science, far from saving the world, was just as likely to speed it along to its destruction. And with so many […]
The Devil’s Advocate & A Life less Ordinary
Blame it on Quentin Tarantino and the infamous pseudoquote from Ezekiel he wrote into Pulp Fiction. Trashy treatments of religious themes have been all the rage lately, and while there’s nothing wrong with conveying spiritual ideas in down-to-earth terms, the latest films to tell heavenly stories with earthly meanings have squandered their potential. Take The […]
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