This essay exposes the Christological bankruptcy of theodicy in the modern age, revealing the essential nature of any system of knowledge as being open to epistemological crises, especially with regard to Christianity.
When Gentlemen Broncos (Jared Hess, 2009) was on big screens last fall, New Yorker critic Richard Brody compared the Mormon film maker’s religious vision to that of Pasolini. (It strikes me that a less lofty point of comparison might be Kevin Smith – Clerks (1994), Dogma (1999) – whose sensibility similarly pairs an eternally adolescent […]
Freed from the tyranny of Indiewire list-nerd criteria, Doug Cummings has finally gotten around to listing his Top 10 for the year and Top 50 for the decade. Film Journey is a great resource in general, and his top 50 would be a wonderful way to catch up on cinema if one were so inclined.
I want to put on the table some recent inversions of fundamentalism expressed under the guise of postmodern re-alignments. By fundamentalism I’m referring to the Christian fundamentalism created in the wake of the modernist debates in the US around the 1920 (a fun genealogy is here), not fundamentalism in ‘general’ if there is such of […]
The Secret of Kells is a movie full to bursting with the pure potential of animation, an aesthetic experience so impeccably designed that style and substance are indistinguishable.
u n d e r t h e m u d b r i c k s w o o d a n d m e t a l r o o f s i n b e t w e e n p a n c a k e d b u i l […]
Dubai and Nairobi represent two ends of the poverty/wealth spectrum, but which one is really wealthy?
Thomas Doherty, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, considers that endangered species known as the professional film critic: “It sucks,” decrees an Internet movie critic, sharing the most common aesthetic reaction in contemporary film criticism. In the viral salon of bloggers and chat-roomers, the finely tuned turns of phrase crafted by an earlier generation of […]
Steven D. Greydanus (of Decent Films fame) has posted a wonderful overview of Hayao Miyazaki, his films, and their influence on American cinema. Miyazaki’s American proponents hoped Ponyo would be his breakout film stateside, but mainstream success in America continues to elude him. That is a shame, and our loss. Hayao Miyazaki is one of […]