Opinion

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You are running a very outdated version of Internet Explorer. Patheos and most other websites will not display properly on this version. To better enjoy Patheos and your overall web experience, consider upgrading to the current version of Internet Explorer. Find more information HERE. ... read more

If there’s a “before” and “after” in the Mission: Impossible franchise, an obvious dividing point is the Burj Khalifa. This now-iconic sequence in the fourth film, 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, revolutionized the series around spectacular set pieces centered on Cruise actually performing jaw-dropping, death-defying practical stunts on location. By contrast, in 2006’s ... read more

While less creativity went into Prince Eric and King Triton, Christopher Daniel Barnes is adequately appealing as Eric, and Kenneth Mars provides the template for domineering Disney dads for years to come. The potent father-daughter conflict isn’t completely without precedent — see, for example, Peter Pan’s blustering Father Darling capriciously exiling Wendy from the nursery, ... read more

In cinema history, the one science-fiction work that, so to speak, flung open the stable doors for audiences and later filmmakers was Stanley Kubrick’s towering 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, released 55 years ago. Science fiction in movies is essentially as old as cinema itself, and 1950s movies like The Day the Earth ... read more

Returning to the Spider-Verse, for some of us, is a deeply fraught proposition. There is one other animated superhero film that looks deeply into the human condition and which has a profound emotional significance for me: Brad Bird’s 2004 masterpiece The Incredibles. Incredibles 2, made 14 years later, is enjoyable and sometimes moving, but ... read more

The golden age of Pixar lasted a decade and a half, spanning ten films from Toy Story to Up. In those days the studio routinely knocked out masterpieces, and even the occasional lesser film (A Bug’s Life, Cars) was still pretty good. Pixar’s process of creative collaboration was an important part of its success, ... read more

I was 12 when Raiders of the Lost Ark opened in 1981, and it changed my relationship with movies. I was already an avid moviegoer; what’s more, between the first two films in the Star Wars and Superman franchises, along with Jaws and Close Encounters, John Williams was a huge part of the soundtrack ... read more

* * * SDG: You would have been about 19 years old at the time that this movie is set, is that right? O’Sullivan: Yes. That’s the time that I left Ireland. SDG: Is the Irish Catholic small-town world that we see in the film very similar to the world of your own youth? O’Sullivan: ... read more

The first two Creed films were “legacyquels” in the strict sense given by Matt Singer in coining the term: movies “in which beloved aging stars reprise classic roles and pass the torch to younger successors.” By this definition, 2006’s Rocky Balboa, coming 16 years after Rocky V, was not a legacyquel; it could be ... read more

The creepiness of these incidents contrasts jarringly with the fond mythology around Murray as a benignly whimsical spirit, even an unlikely sage. Murray’s well-established penchant for unpredictable behavior both among his peers and with random people in public ranges from bizarre, almost surreal performance art — for example, shouting nonsense at passersby like “There’s ... read more

Right to the end, there’s a sense that the showrunners are trying to keep us guessing, even attempting an eleventh-hour fakeout, before revealing (or at least heavily implying) that, well, there was never much of a mystery in the first place. Well, then, why try to make a puzzle out of it? Mystery ... read more

Episode 3 (“Adar”) introduces us to Númenor in its glory, while episode 4 (“The Great Wave”) begins to presage Númenor’s downfall in connection with a strategically deployed Tolkienesque device. A sword is placed in Elendil’s hands in episode 3; is this Narsil, the blade that will be broken? The reason for the suspicious hostility ... read more

As is typical for his films, Farhadi’s characters generally act in reasonable, understandable ways, given their perspective, interests, and knowledge at the time. You can see how our embattled protagonist begins to feel as if no good deed goes unpunished, but you can also see how Farhadi cross-examines the very idea of a rising ... read more

The instigating incident in Bruges is an ambush in a confessional. Ray’s first assignment as a hitman is to murder a priest, whom he pretends to approach for confession before gunning him down—in the process accidentally killing a young boy waiting to confess such innocent shortcomings as moodiness and badness at math. Calvary opens with ... read more

The movie year 2022 was a year of memory and identity, with one film after another exploring how memory both gives us access to our past, to our roots, and also distorts and obscures the past. At least five notable films (including three of my favorites) are from filmmakers drawing on childhood memories of ... read more