Me and You is a small and quiet return of Bertolucci to the festival circuit. It has been almost a decade since The Dreamers. The film is much less ambitious in scope than most of his prior work. As a result, critics have been very mixed on whether the film eventually works or not. A Guardian reviewer even […]
Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory shared a simple theatrical frame My Dinner With Andre. The film is quintessential art house cinema, inspired internally by a choice quote from Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. Malle’s two-shot framing also presages a lot of the simplicity that would later characterize American indie cinema – convinced that something other than visual […]
The Theory of Everything is a film potentially about so much it runs into the problem of deciding what it has to say. The marriage of Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde is well publicized – the subject of two separate and lengthy accounts by Wilde. The first, Music to Move the Stars gave way a few years […]
As many TOJ readers know, this October saw the release of Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel, Lila. This was cause for great rejoicing among her many fans and a chance for those who can’t see the genius of her work to point that out again. As an unapologetic fan I’ve already finished the novel and was […]
As Bruce Ellis Benson’s recent book Liturgy as a Way of Life reminds us, “in making art, we always start with something.”[1] To be an artist is not to create ex nihilo but to creatively reinterpret and rework the preexisting forms of art, nature, and culture—including the stories and images that shape and direct our […]
I grew up in a mile-square beachfront town sixty miles south of New York City. From the time I was six years old, when my family left its North Jersey urban roots, every summer day was spent on the beach. When my sister and I were old enough, we peddled there on our bikes to […]
Ten years ago this fall I entered seminary to pursue my M.Div. and, I thought, a career as a campus pastor at a Christian college. The “calling” to the pastorate was one I’d felt early in my life, and I took that call seriously during my time in seminary. I thought often about the past, […]
Peter J. Leithart. Shining Glory: Theological Reflections on Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013. It’s not your average big-budget, Brad Pitt–starring movie that receives a book response from a systematic theologian. But Peter Leithart is not your average systematic theologian. And Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is not […]
Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are. —Ortega Y Gasset Alan Durning, founder of the Seattle-based Sightline Institute, recounts the story of a trip he took to the Philippines. After interviewing several elders as part of the trip, he was introduced to a frail old […]
