Focus on the Family / Tyndale, 1880/1997. Gladiator is a razzle-dazzle action-packed film, but for true spectacle, the classics can’t be beat. In the old days, you didn’t create stadiums on computers; you spent months building them, then staging elaborate chariot races before real-life crowds. Sometimes a race was all a movie needed; the first […]
Jeanette Petkau’s faith is Beyond Reason
Langley singer/songwriter Jeanette Petkau has just gone Beyond Reason . That’s the title of her latest CD, which has been getting air play on both Canadian and American radio stations. Petkau recently celebrated her newfound success with a ‘Valentine Social / CD Release Party,’ held at North Langley Community Church February 11. Beyond Reason , […]
The New World a feast for the senses and spirit alike
Los Angeles — Terrence Malick movies take a long time to gestate. Malick typically shoots hours and hours of footage, much of it improvised, and he then spends months editing it together. And in a career that goes back 33 years, he has directed only four films: Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line […]
Dogma has slacker theology
Dogma is not a great film, or even a good one, by any stretch of the imagination — the humor is largely derivative and the dialogue is both repetitive and didactic — but beneath its many vulgarities, it offers an interesting peek into the theology of its writer and director, a churchgoing Catholic slacker named […]
The Messenger: Irresponsible
THERE’S a fine line between bravery and recklessness, and this point is made in more ways than one by The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. On the one hand, the Joan of this film is portrayed, by Milla Jovovich, as an impatient, emotionally overwrought girl who gets people to do what she wants […]
Fight Club
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 […]