A better reaction to violence emerges in the classic British/Irish film from 1947 Odd Man Out
New and true stories that inspire in a way fiction can’t.
Narratives of violence need to do more than entertain
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is something very unusual indeed: a sequel to an unexpected hit that is actually redefining expectations of who will go to the cinema. Studios are getting used to the idea that as we are living longer, there is an audience that wants to be catered to—but not patronized. The film is about English retirees…
Movie Review
Movie Review
Everyone interprets movies from a vantage point, whether we acknowledge it or not. Mine is simple: the purpose of art is to help us live better. The delight in cinema is that the experience of watching is like dreaming, and so the images on screen mingle easily with the projections in our own minds. If, as great spiritual teachings say,…
American Sniper, Clint Eastwood’s film about the most lethal sniper in US military history has been stirring up controversy. People are fighting in the blogosphere about whether it’s a patriotic masterpiece of tension, or a tale of a misguided, vengeance-fueled man whose courage prevents us from questioning what he did with it. But I think the controversy is missing the…
We think we know Martin Luther King, the dreamer, the orator, the man who led a revolution, whose name is on street signs, whose features are now etched in stone at a Washington memorial, who shows up in hip hop videos and computer ads, whose most famous speech may be the most-quoted in our collective memories. “Think different,” said the…
