Category: Review

  • Lady Bird

    Lady Bird

    Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Oscar season. After a dismal year at the movies, studios have saved their best for last. December boasts the most hopefuls, but November has a trick up its sleeve: a little indie called Lady Bird. Greta Gerwig isn’t a household name, but you’ve seen her before. She’s acted in roles…

  • Mully

    Mully

    Mully is a documentary that tells the story of the extraordinary life of Charles Mully. Mully’s story is so impossible that if you pitched it to a studio, they’d tell you to try telling a true story with some elements of reality in it. Come to think of it, if you pitched Mully’s story to your…

  • The Green Pastures

    The Green Pastures

    Whiteness in America, Michael Eric Dyson writes, is the result of “breaking down or, at least to a degree, breaking up ethnicity, and then building up an identity that was cut off from the old tongue and connected to the new land.” Whiteness takes many forms; it informs, establishing a social stronghold, and when that…

  • First They Killed My Father

    First They Killed My Father

    Most people living today have only a vague memory of the Vietnam War, or none at all.  As a teenager growing up in a very conservative area my memories were taken from Walter Cronkite’s TV reports, my local paper, and a few radio broadcasts. We were told America was sending soldiers to Southeast Asia to…

  • Mother!

    Mother!

    Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! abounds with religious metaphors as well as social commentary via cryptic symbolism impossible to definitively decipher. A mishmash of surreal imagery combines with increasingly compounding absurdity that drives our extremely visceral experience and nearly plot-less depiction of a woman’s gradual psychological unraveling as she struggles to restore her idyllic rustic house after…

  • American Made / Battle of the Sexes / Stronger

    American Made / Battle of the Sexes / Stronger

    Welcome to another edition of Mini-Review Roundup where we present smaller reviews of several movies at once. Up this month: American Made, Battle of the Sexes, and Stronger.   American Made   Scientology may be a made-up religion, but they’ve clearly found the cure for aging. Tom Cruise hasn’t had a birthday in 30 years.…

  • Blade Runner 2049

    Blade Runner 2049

    Blade Runner is a classic. That’s undisputed. The 1982 film, directed by Ridley Scott, is a breathtaking blend of noir and science-fiction that offers us a glimpse of the future we desire and dread. Harrison Ford shines as Rick Deckard, a “Blade Runner” tasked with hunting down and killing a group of rogue replicants. Replicants…

  • The LEGO Ninjago Movie

    The LEGO Ninjago Movie

    In the past three years, the Lego-verse has given us construction workers who are the key to everything and a caped crusader with family issues. This time around, The Lego Ninjago Movie introduces us to a boy with father issues and his group of friends who might be the key to everything! Moving at Ninja…

  • Downhill Racer

    Downhill Racer

    In junior high, I was given the most fantastic textbook. That might seem an oxymoron to you and maybe I had low standards at the time, but it was an English textbook, and what I remember are the short stories, several of which among the best I’ve ever read. One of them, published in 1980,…

  • It

    It

    Stephen King doesn’t typically make the “must read” list for Christians. On the surface, his tales appear dark and deranged, but a deeper look reveals a different story. Regardless of whether King is a practicing Christian (he declared himself one on his website, but has since pushed back on the label), his work speaks for…