The Christian Century

Dinner would have to wait. Eddie Schmidt and Kirby Dick wanted to interview me in connection with a documentary they were making for the Independent Film Channel (IFC), and Schmidt wanted to discuss the church’s relationship to the film industry. It looked like a promising interview. I should have known better.

North America’s largest Islamic organization has elected Ingrid Mattson, a Canadian-born convert and Islamic scholar, as president, making her the first woman to lead any major Muslim organization on the continent.

Veteran Italian director Ettore Scola begins his latest film, Gente di Roma (People of Rome), by following an older couple going through their morning routine—she preparing food, he dressing for work. Their apartment is small, so one camera covers their movements between rooms. The wife puts coffee on a counter, the husband sips it while she packs his lunch in brown paper.

I was an innocent Nebraska teen visiting Milwaukee when I saw my first musical, which I thought was about Oklahoma.

On the five Saturday nights before the 2003 Academy Awards show on March 23, a young adult group at a large church in Pasadena, California, has been discussing the five Oscar nominees for best picture.

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” In Steven Daldry’s film The Hours, this opening line from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway connects three women in three stories. In the first, Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) is writing a novel about Clarissa Dalloway, who makes a decision to buy flowers for a dinner party she is giving that evening.

Any year that gives us films from directors David Lynch, the Coen brothers, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick has to be a good year. True, the Spielberg-Kubrick combined effort, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is not pure Kubrick, since his death required that the work be finished by Spielberg. But it remains the most significant film released in 2001.