When the characters in The Descendants finally act hopefully, graciously, kindly, and forgivingly, it comes as a delightful surprise, as if a breath of life emanates from the screen and fills the audience with a force of life not too far removed from the life that filled Adam in Eden years and years ago...

Abandon thy cynicism, all who enter the theater to see Steven Spielberg's War Horse, the most unashamedly sentimental film the crowd-pleasing director has directed in twenty years...

There is nothing technically wrong with this movie - it's not a bad film - but there isn't anything particularly worthy of note either. If this wasn't a silent film, I don't think anyone would care about it at all...

The ugliness that Belle has to learn to look past isn't just the physical ugliness of the beast. It's the ugliness that she perceives in living an ordinary life. She has to learn to see the beauty of love even if it means surrendering some of her independence and sense of adventure...

Besides trying to save the world, Holmes' motivation for traveling the world in this movie is to save his friendship with Dr. Watson. Faced with the doctor's marriage, Holmes fears losing his friend...

So often these days it seems films feature action played out in front of a green screen, and as good as today's CGI is, it's not reality, and CGI stunts just lack peril. Ghost Protocol has peril...

I've long been grateful for Jim Henson, for his Muppets and for his graceful search for his "rainbow connection." In doing so, he approached the joy and happiness we're all called to. With his weird little camaraderie of puppets, he gave us a clearer picture of what it means to be human than we find in most other places...

Martin Scorsese seems to just really loves movies. Maybe this love stems from this childhood when because of his struggles with asthma, he spent his days in the local cinema instead of playing outside. The imagination of moviemakers awakened young Scorsese to new possibilities, and in Hugo, every character is awakened by the imagination of another...

Hoover's files are full of recordings and correspondences of a sexually scandalous nature. To Hoover, it seems that the most dreadful secrets to keep are those of sexual malfeasance. Hoover felt oppressed by American society because of his sexuality, so he used sexuality to oppress the avatars of his oppressor. Hoover wielded the weapon he knew best, the very weapon wielded against him...

I think of the too many people I have lost in my life to one form of cancer or another. These are the names I hold in my hand when I shake my fist at the heavens. Their names are the questions that fuel my doubts of God's goodness and activity in the world. When I think of the ones I've lost though, I also think of the ones who stood resolutely beside them through their illness to and beyond the point of death...

Higher Ground is full of characters building to moments of revelation, and the film is about the build-up more than it is about the revelatory moments. In this, Higher Ground is monumentally better than almost all other films I've seen concerned with the complexities of the Christian life...

I do not doubt that there is a complicated psychosis beneath Drive's stylized exterior, but that veneer proves all but impenetrable. Like its hero, Drive reveals nothing of what it is about. The film simply moves and asks its audience to respond...

There are movies that make me feel good about who I am. I see my country/race/gender/religion represented on screen, and I think to myself, this is good. I am proud to be a… whatever is being represented on screen. Machine Gun Preacher is not one of those movies...

Warrior is about two Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighters who are brothers and their father. The younger brother is a prodigal son of sorts, who, after fourteen years on the run, has returned home. The older brother is a married with two daughters high school physics teacher about to lose his house

The Debt, perhaps, makes the truth seem like a slave driver or a burden too great to bear. Ought we instead to strip the truth of its power and side with Atonement and the idea that the truth is made in the telling, in the fiction not the fact?

For the first hour and forty-five minutes of the film, I hated Hilly with passion, and then I realized the sadness and desperation of her own life. Hilly does not sit enthroned atop a gleaming pyramid. She reigns over a dung heap...

Good sci-fi explores current issues in fantastic situations. The original Planet of the Apes is so good partly because it was so pertinent to its time. The 1960s were the decade of African American civil rights and the perils of nuclear proliferation. The original film tackled both these issues using talking apes. Today, we live in an Era of Rights. Everything from marriage to...

I did find myself sympathetic to the movie's villain at one point when he declares to Captain America that he has seen the future, and it is "a world without flags." I believe in that future too, though I expect...

Lighting at one point says to Mater, “You don’t need to change to fit into society. Society needs to change fit you in” (paraphrase). I contend that while society does need to accept Mater for who he is, Mater needs to learn how to behave in social situations. If the “adult” Mater is unwilling to develop social skills, I don’t think we should be laughing at him...

Though the movie begins with real chemistry between the two leads in the opening scenes – there is humor, and candor, and connection – the focus of the movie ultimately turns elsewhere. As we watch the story unfold, we find ourselves asking questions. Is what we do somehow destined to be? Do we really have free will, or is it somehow planned out for us (by parents? Context? God? Destiny?) If we are married, for example, did we simply choose our mate, or is there some sense in which we were chosen for each other?

When bad things happen to good people, we all know that there are no words capable of answering our grief. Or if there are words, they are most often primal questions and childlike observations. So it is for Jack...

It would be easy to criticize this movie as being derivative, boring in its similarities to earlier, better work by either Abrams or Spielberg and an ultimately lazy work of manipulative sentimentality masking deep cynicism and greed. One could hate this film and in the same breath laud its antecedents...

Usually, I am able to crank out movie reviews with a machine-like regularity that is rivaled only by Hollywood’s ability to make sub-par sequels. For the past two weeks though, I’ve been having quite a bit of trouble writing reviews...

In this episode of the Reel Spirituality podcast, Co-Directors Eugene Suen and Elijah Davidson discuss The Tree of Life and Midnight in Paris.

The Tree of Life is about everything in light of one thing. The story revolves around the memories of a Dallas architect (Sean Penn) reminiscing about his boyhood in Waco, Texas, and the death of his younger brother. His personal history is couched within the history of all of Time...

The gods walk among us, or in the case of Thor, the space aliens we have always considered gods walk among the very few citizens of remote towns in New Mexico. This film isn't based on Scandinavian mythology. It is based on the Marvel comic book based on Scandinavian mythology. I think that makes Thor the Scary Movie of superhero movies...

Meek's Cutoff is a claustrophobic film about a harrowing expanse. The story focuses primarily on the matriarchs of the three families. The women wear large, curve-brimmed bonnets to protect themselves from the sun and wind...

Hanna is a very depressing film. Very simply, this is a tale of lost innocence. It begins with images of pristine, snow-capped hills and slumbering, snow white swans, and it ends in an abandoned, decrepit amusement park in the shadow of the fangs of tunnel shaped liked the open jaws of a wolf. In between a sixteen-year-old girl does horrific things to countless people oftentimes using nothing but her bare hands.

Does Source Code explicitly acknowledge the gospel? Absolutely not, but as I elaborated at the beginning of this review, technology is increasingly becoming the realm of the unexplainable and mysterious. It is becoming the method of the in-breaking of the divine into the mundanity of our lives...

Win Win is a tale of tested character. Woven throughout are a whole host of other wonderful themes as well - hospitality, forgiveness, care for the elderly, unselfishness, second chances, renewed hope, justice, family, and the kind of faith that is lived more than talked about. Win Win is a story about a good man on the precipice of being less than that and the people who help him keep from falling...

And undergirding the entire narrative is the conviction that people are worthy of love, both to love and to be loved. That is a beautiful conviction out of which to live...

At it's core this film is about faithfulness. The monks' is a faith proven by action. They are faithful in their liturgies. They are faithful in their work amongst the Algerian people. They are faithful in their care for each other...

Rango is not the movie you are expecting. Is it a cartoon? Yes. Is it a Western? Yes. Is it populated by cute animals voiced by celebrities like Johnny Depp and Abigail Breslin? Yes. But it is so much more. Rango is an existential Western...

Enter The Adjustment Bureau. The slick sci-fi thriller is concerned very explicitly with the will of God on earth. Granted the Piper/Bell controversy is more concerned with the eternal fate of all humankind, and The Adjustment Bureau is about the more temporal fate, but the underlying question is the same...

Truth in today's culture seems to be relative, at least partially, to one's community. The meaning of anything, including a person, is drawn from whatever surrounds it.

I was harrowed by Winter’s Bone. Hailing from a rural area myself, I recognized in the burned out trailers and dirt roads the land of my youth. I knew growing up whose property to stay off of upon threat of my life...

The Illusionist is one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. It is also one of the most heartbreaking. It is story of a man who awakens a belief in magic in a young girl who had no reason to believe in anything other than hunger and cold. She sticks herself to him like a song sticks in your head, and he spends himself to preserve her newly awakened sense of wonder.

Science-fiction has long been the genre that wrestles best with the "improbable made possible," to quote Rod Serling, and what that being "made possible" means for humanity. Science-fiction is the story-thought realm of technological, social, and political ethics. Sci-fi, for all its aliens, spaceships, and ray guns, is about the practical, immediate, tangible parts of our lives. Never Let Me Go is a good science-fiction film...

We are given a verse, and then the first image we see is a cross, shining through the blackness, out of focus but shining nonetheless...

Like Schindler’s List, Amistad does not simply portray the dehumanization caused by racial bigotry, though it does do that movingly and convincingly. Instead, it also reveals human goodness even within evil systems, hope within horror...

Like an artful sermon, Beauty acknowledges evil, but also offers legitimate hope. Ricky explains the ultimate meaning of the film’s title. He talks about a homeless woman, frozen to death, that he captured on video. “When you see something like that, it’s just like God is looking right at you, just for a second. And if you’re careful, you can look right back.”

Like an artful sermon, Beauty acknowledges evil, but also offers legitimate hope. Ricky explains the ultimate meaning of the film’s title. He talks about a homeless woman, frozen to death, that he captured on video. “When you see something like that, it’s just like God is looking right at you, just for a second. And if you’re careful, you can look right back.”

Watching Marcus wear down Will is just one of the many humorous pleasures of the film. Eventually, but kicking and screaming most of the way, Will sees that life without another is meaningless, and that “once you open your heart to one person, you open it to others.” About a Boy is sweet, but also often bittersweet, for it deals with the human condition in a realistic way. Both comedy and drama come from the characters and their situations, for such is life...

Our experiences in a movie theater can range from pure entertainment to art to a divine moment. Rob has shared how the film Beckett became an experience of hearing God’s call to ministry. The Year of Living Dangerously became a moment of “conversion” in my life...

The Coens have often been accused by detractors as cold, analytical misanthropes, but whether or not their new film’s pessimism is an epistemologically warranted position, or merely another case of personal neurosis blown to cosmic proportion, is beside the point. As it stands, A Serious Man is an impeccably made comedy that offers some gravely serious reflections on what it means to be human...

The film Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man is a visual and musical memoir of the legendary singer-songwriter of the 60’s and 70’s, Leonard Cohen, and the current artists he has influenced. This documentary, while centering on the “Come So Far for Beauty” concert at the Sydney Opera House in 2005 in honor of Cohen, also includes intimate interviews with this Canadian beat poet who put much of his work to music, and with the artists who draw inspiration from him...

Similar to the radio show, which has been on the air since 1974 (or as Guy Noir says, “…since Jesus was in the 3rd grade.”), this fictional movie is not about anything in particular really. Less about plot (the viewer is supposedly getting a behind-the-scenes look at the final radio broadcast of the show due to the sale of the Fitzgerald Theater to a cold-hearted corporate hack), the film is more about moments, songs, conversations, and characters...

“Iris,” the most adult film of the three movies, is also a true story of a woman stricken with Alzheimer’s disease. Adapted from John Bayley’s (portrayed by Jim Broadbent) memoir of his wife, the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch (Judi Dench), the movie shows viewers their 40-plus year marriage. It movingly brings to light the love and pain which commitment can bring, particularly when one of the life partners slowly loses her mind to Alzheimer’s disease...

Though the plot is somewhat predictable and a tear-jerker (in the best and worst sense of the phrase), Sam’s unconditional, unabashed, and inexhaustible love for Lucy is inspiring to any parent regardless of their I.Q. Even Rita is transformed, as she discovers her own humanity by seeing the beauty of Sam’s...

Mental illness is not something we “successful and self-reliant” Americans like to look at. Thus, these portrayals give us a window into persons we often otherwise fail to see...

2012 is ridiculous in an awesome kind of way, but what else can you expect from a disaster movie literally about the end of the world?