Film

Hollywood Embraces a Simplistic Diversity

In Hollywood now, race and gender matter so much that nothing else does. Craft and storytelling have gone out of fashion. Let’s not forget why we pay the ticket price: to lose ourselves in a convincing drama... Human depth...

Dirty Harry: The Rage of the Anti-Hero

In December 1971, Dirty Harry appeared on movie screens. Starring the then rising movie star, Clint Eastwood, the film proved as controversial as it was successful at the box office. Today, Mr. Eastwood is Movie...

The All-American Magic of Ricky Jay

Ricky Jay was born in 1948 and died last Saturday. He was the greatest magician in America for more than a generation and a character whose like we will not see again. He combined the all-American love of...

Incarnation and the Moving Image: Towards a Christian Philosophy of Film

In the iconoclasm controversy of the eighth century, the church debated the possibility of images in worship. The Eastern Church, challenged by the rise of Islam, with its total prohibition of religious imagery, worried that Christian imagery broke the...

The Authenticity of Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino”

Clint Eastwood made his name with a squint, a glare, a snarl, and a few well-chosen one-liners. His vigilante loner has served him well in films from the spaghetti Westerns, the Dirty Harry franchise, Unforgiven, Pale Rider, and more.

The Long Shadows Cast by “Nightmare Alley”

Just as the Second World War ended, the 1946 novel Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham became a bestseller. Perhaps more than any other, the noir genre fitted the mood of Post–war America. It...

Family, Love, and Tragedy in “The Godfather”

The Godfather is the Augustinian film par excellence–though it does not conclude where Augustine's vision ends... The Godfather, by Mario Puzo, was the best-selling book when it was first published and the film adaptation...

Using Classic Movies to Win the Culture Wars

The imagination must be won back. This is Dr. Onalee McGraw’s aim, and she fights with the finest of the films made in our own nation, by Hollywood itself, and sometimes even by corrupt men and women... “You...

The Death of Europe: Two Classic Films and the Great War

So incisive and troubling did the Nazis find Jean Renoir’s indictment of war and his embrace of the shared culture of Europe, that when the Wehrmacht invaded France and occupied Paris in the spring of 1940, Renoir's film La Grande Illusion was among the first cultural artifacts Nazi officials confiscated...

Russell Kirk’s Ghostly Tales: Horror and Eternity

Russell Kirk’s horror stories are fundamentally conservative, insinuating a chain of being that connects the living and the dead, reminding us of our duty and obligations to the past. They challenge us by piercing our day-to-day sense of the temporal with bright flashes of eternal order. And...

Our Own American Genocide: “Gosnell,” the Movie

While Gosnell tells the true story of a squalid, back-street abortion mill, we are also reminded by the film that the majority of baby murders are committed legally by nice, middle-class people who are well-connected, well-off, well-educated, well-spoken, and well-funded...

The Coen Brothers’ “True Grit”: Little Girls, Outrageous Outcasts, & Romantic Fools

The Coen brothers' heroes in True Grit are wacky anti-heroes, representing the common man against the establishment elite, the ordinary man in the face of outlandish wickedness. As such, they inspire every outsider who longs for greatness, every outcast who has a heart of genius, and every romantic fool who loves beauty,...

Alfred Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps”: A Coded Message?

The 39 Steps is one of five films that Alfred Hitchcock made in England about espionage in the mid-to-late 1930s. These films capture the growing threat felt in Britain from foreign powers. In their scenarios the nation's security was nowhere more threatened than by spies hiding in plain sight...

Mel Gibson, “Hacksaw Ridge,” & the Real Hollywood Counter-Culture

In Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson continues to present an alternative world-view to filmgoers. It is one at odds with almost all that emanates from Hollywood, but, nevertheless, is one that finds a welcome reception in the real world, where family and marriage, patriotism and courage, faith and...