With Marco Polo, Netflix reaches for a global audience. Unfortunately, it casts the epic drama through one European’s eyes.
On Media
Kathryn Reklis reviews film, TV, and more
Sympathy for Pharaoh
Exodus: Gods and Kings has more in common with the 2004 sword-and-sandal disaster Alexander than with the other biblical epics of 2014.
Like Sarah Koenig, I want to know if we can believe Adnan Syed. But I only know Syed through Koenig’s accounts of him in Serial.
Leaving guyland
Pop culture often reduces men to testosterone, with little room to acknowledge themselves as God’s image bearers. But there are glimmers of hope.
“Are we alone in the universe?” is always a question about God’s existence. The film Interstellar shows this clearly.
Sex in the lab
On Masters of Sex, the wired-up naked bodies are not nearly as titillating as the melodramas that unfold when the characters are fully clothed.
Gillian Flynn has been accused of hating women. I disagree: Flynn pushes the truth of what can happen to women in a world that diminishes them.
Christopher Foyle has a deep sense of right and wrong. Foyle's War offers both moral clarity and moral complexity.
Lars and the Real Girl shows the power of the visual medium to tell a theological story. I not only felt that I knew Lars, but that I knew myself through his fear of the tangles of relationship, his anxiety about the need to be transformed, and his desire to put transformation off as long as possible.
Best pictures
On the second anniversary of our media column, we asked several of our writers to reflect on their favorite theological films.
The Coen brothers’ sense of humor is not for everyone, but anyone with any sympathy for slackerdom can find a place in his heart for The Big Lebowski. I consider it a near-perfect illustration of the ancient Christian virtue of apatheia.
I’ve never seen a film that translates grace to the screen like Babette’s Feast. As one of the rare films that focuses on the lined and battered faces of real people Babette’s Feast challenges viewers to love real life. The film embraces God’s love for the embodied, the ordinary and the value of the extraordinary, and a love that wastes nothing.
The Giver’s temptations
If ever a movie with a teenage protagonist was tailor-made for sermon illustrations, it is this one.
Experiments in time
Every story is a story about time. Boyhood's power is not the perimeters of its story as much as the immersion into it.
Priest under threat
Calvary is a masterpiece of religious filmmaking. Its greatest achievement is to convey the impact of a community's near-collapse of faith.
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