Opinion

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Fitt 1: Sir Gawain and Christian Camelot If you know anything at all about the plot of the celebrated 14th-century Middle English narrative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, you probably know this much: It opens with the mysterious Green Knight challenging King Arthur’s court to what has come to be known as ... read more

The twist in The Chosen is that it’s good — surprisingly so, and good, in part, because it’s surprising. Faith-based productions about Jesus — for example, the Lightworkers projects Son of God and Resurrection — often play like “greatest hits” compilations of familiar Gospel stories, edifying perhaps to the faithful, but doing little either ... read more

In short, Jungle Cruise plays like fan fiction for, like, all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies combined — a gambit you can sort of understand the five writers going with when you consider that the only other precedents for big-screen Disney theme-park attraction movies are The Haunted Mansion and The Country Bears. In ... read more

This raises a knotty moral question: If it took a full-on case of amnesia to put Bourne on the path to redemption, how do you redeem a Black Widow? The question is sharpened when we discover that — unlike the pre-amnesia Bourne, whose final assassination mission was thwarted by the unexpected presence of the ... read more

A little more than a half hour into Of Animals and Men comes a haunting anecdote about a Jewish man, Andrzej Kramsztyk, living in occupied Warsaw when the Nazis ordered all Jews to relocate to the ghetto. As related by his grandson Krzysztof, Andrzej defied the Nazi mandate, refusing to allow his family to ... read more

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The milieu, a small mid-20th century town on the Italian Riviera, isn’t so far removed from that of Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso, which was set in and around the Adriatic, including Italy, during the Great Depression. (In homage to Porco Rosso, the coastal town in Luca is named Portorosso, and vistas of puffy clouds floating ... read more

The more obvious point of comparison is Moana, Disney’s other action-princess movie with Asian-Pacific cultural and mythological roots. (Moana’s milieu is Polynesian, Raya’s Southeast Asian.) Not only is Raya, like Moana, a mythic tale about an intrepid young princess leaving her homeland on a quest to save her world from an intangible menace, in ... read more

Career highlights include supporting roles in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992), Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999), Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001), and Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005). A decade ago he became the oldest actor to win an Oscar for his role in Mike Mills’ Beginners (2010), in which he played an ... read more

In Resurrection (adapted from the first few episodes of the sequel series A.D. The Bible Continues, and thus a sequel of sorts to Son of God), Simon Peter himself (British actor Adam Levy), talking to a Zealot resistance fighter, glibly throws out “Live by the sword and you die by the sword.” Peter does ... read more

Yes, it’s simple enough to be accessible to children. Yet no other Jesus movie I’ve seen is so well-grounded in the historical, cultural, political, religious, and even economic realities of Jesus’ day, or in the religious conflict between Jesus and the Jewish authorities. From Jewish-Roman tensions to diverse groups within Judaism — Pharisees, Sadducees, and ... read more

Between the 2018 opening of A Quiet Place and the arrival of this sequel, though, some of the first film’s themes and images have acquired new resonance. A Quiet Place depicted a family living in isolation, sheltering in place to protect themselves from a scourge ravaging the world around them, not without chafing at ... read more

By contrast, part of what has made power producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, over the last dozen years, the most exciting force in Hollywood animation today is that not only are their original cartoons — Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, The LEGO Movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and now The Mitchells vs. ... read more

In 2020, after two decades of writing regularly about movies, I took a semi-sabbatical (coinciding, of course, with the coronavirus pandemic and the shuttering of movie theaters) and focused on other things. While I saw a lot of films last year (and voted in a number of year-end awards) — and I hope to ... read more

Remember that WWI-era photograph of Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor that Bruce Wayne dug up in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and sent to Diana Prince by way of connecting with a mystery super-woman who might be needed again? (If you don’t remember? “WW84 is agreeably diverting” might be all you need to ... read more