Film

From Netflix's 'When They See Us'

I watched Ava DuVernay’s Netflix series When They See Us and found myself angered by the people and systems that had a role in the incarceration of five innocent boys. The Central Park Five, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Saalam, and Korey Wise, were wrongfully convicted and later exonerated of a variety of charges related to the rape and assault of a white female jogger in 1989. While the series itself honors the stories of the Central Park Five, in choosing to title the series When They See Us, DuVernay invites us into a broader conversation on the criminalization and mass incarceration of young boys and girls of color, and challenges us to define our own role within this system.

Abby Olcese 6-03-2019

Spike Lee. Wesley Mann / August Image

“Always do the right thing.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“I got it. I’m gone.”

DA MAYOR (Ossie Davis) and Mookie (Spike Lee) share this exchange in Lee’s film Do the Right Thing, which turns 30 this summer. Three decades on, Lee’s masterpiece on racism and community still stands out for its trailblazing voice. Lee, and the film that blasted him into broad public consciousness, continue to inspire powerful work by filmmakers of color, including Dear White People, Get Out, and The Hate U Give.

It’s undeniable that Do the Right Thing’s bold style and perspective are what helped it become iconic. Its depiction of the police killing of black men also remains powerful and, as it turned out, prescient. The film almost seems to have predicted events that unfolded 25 years later following the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and so many others.

Gareth Higgins 5-17-2019

Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen in The Long Shot. Photo via Long Shot Movie on Facebook.

There are moments in Long Shot, the new comedy in which Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen fall for each other, save the country from dehumanizing polarization, and (maybe) the planet from dehumanized humans, in which I wondered if I was watching something as good as Tootsie. It’s really easy to make a slapstick joke, but really hard to integrate dozens of them into a coherent work (there’s a reason the Marx Brothers don’t have many heirs); and it’s even harder to weave comic tropes into a story that also manages to feel like real life.

Juliet Vedral 5-08-2019

Still from "Tolkien" film trailer 

Dome Karukoski’s Tolkien, out in theaters this Friday, focuses on another story of friendship, that of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS) which Tolkien was a part of during his education at King Edward’s School in Birmingham. The film tells the story of Tolkien’s early life as an orphan living in poverty and at the mercy of his benefactors, and the love and friendship he finds in spite of it. Tolkien is gorgeously shot and filmed with warmth, humor, and friendship.

Gareth Higgins 5-08-2019

Lucien Greaves delivering a speech in front of the state capitol building in Little Rock, Ark., in Hail, Satan?, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

It turns out that The Church of Satan as founded by Anton LaVey was more of a hedonistic club than something to fear, and today’s The Satanic Temple (TST) an entirely distinct organization — an emerging religious community whose tenets are dedicated to compassion, making amends for mistakes, and promoting religious liberty.

Da’Shawn Mosley 5-02-2019

Father Theodore Hesburgh

The new documentary Hesburgh, which premieres nationwide on Friday, May 3, and is directed by the Emmy-nominated filmmaker Patrick Creadon (Wordplay, I.O.U.S.A.) gives us a thorough look at Father Hesburgh’s walk. From Hesburgh’s origins to his decision to devote his life to the priesthood, to his appointment — at the young age of 35 — as president of the University of Notre Dame, to all the personal, national, and global adversities that the man of the cloth later faced afterward, Hesburgh weaves a beautiful and engaging story of faith lived out.

Gareth Higgins 4-18-2019

From Official Trailer for 'Diane'

What lingers most after seeing Diane, a wise, sad, and beautiful film, and the best reason to go to the movies this week, is the roads. The title character, anchored in an immersive performance by Mary Kay Place, is always driving - from her house to the extended family who josh and complain and hold each other up, from there to the apartment where her son is failing to hide his problems, from there to the deathbed of a dear friend with whom she has a complicated history, from there to the church soup kitchen where she serves.

Juana Luz Tobar Ortega in 'Santuario' 

In May 2017, Juana Luz Tobar Ortega took sanctuary at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Greensboro, N.C. Originally from Guatemala, she had received a deportation sentence that would have separated her from her husband, four children, and two grandchildren, after living and working in the United States for over 20 years. Juana’s story, which is one among many harrowing stories of families harmed by aggressive immigration policies under the Trump administration, is now the subject of a documentary film.

Kayla Lattimore 3-28-2019

From Friday the 13th to Halloween, there’s nothing I love more than a great horror film that has a good twist at the end. Though they tend to follow the same predictable plot, I still enjoy the ride. Yet, there has never been a horror film that has stayed with me — until I watched Us directed by Jordan Peele. I sat in my car for 20 minutes thinking of how uneasy I felt, which I believe was the point of the film: to leave you unsettled. After watched it, I realized that Peele has not only created a haunting piece of art but has also proven to be a craftsman in the art of subversion. This film makes you question who you perceive to be the other and how that conflict manifests in our world.

Gareth Higgins 3-22-2019

From ‘Faces Places’

SOMETHING WONDERFUL is happening in popular cinema: a new psychological depth married to kinetic technique that seems to emerge from filmmakers’ willingness to show their vulnerability. Notice how First Man is far more than a moon landing epic; it’s massively about the heart. Blindspotting takes racism more seriously than it takes itself. And Leave No Trace doesn’t settle for catharsis but invites us to do something in response to the brokenness on screen. There are dozens more films like this.

The psychological depth and open vulnerability of these films are mirrored in the way we talk about movies. It’s easy to find good film criticism that tells us about the writer’s life, and conversation about how cinema interacts with the world is no longer exclusively an elitist game.

But our favorite films don’t just tell us what we think about the world: They tell us something about what we think of ourselves. If what we pay attention to shows us what we love, it may also show us what we allow to love us. It bears exploration: What do our favorite films say about who we are, who we want to be, how we see the world, and what we feel we deserve? What are they inviting us to become?

Juliet Vedral 3-13-2019

Justin Baldoni arrives for the 'Five Feet Apart' Los Angeles Premiere on March 07, 2019. Credit: Shutterstock. 

If you knew that your life here on earth would be short, how would you live it? Would you try to control every aspect of it to avoid the suffering and pain you knew was coming? Would you become angry, embittered, and push people away? Or would you try to make the most of it? These questions are at the heart of Five Feet Apart, starring Cole Sprouse and Haley Lu Richardson as two kids with cystic fibrosis (CF) who fall in love. The film is actor (Jane the Virgin) and filmmaker ( My Last Days) Justin Baldoni’s feature film debut.

Reza Aslan

So far, Aslan’s cable shows — including his Muslim-American family sitcom that was dropped by ABC — have not panned out. But his ambitions to reach a broader audience remain as large as ever. And unlike the somewhat braggadocios and didactic style of commentary that he’s become known for in front of television cameras, he’s eager to change minds while occupying a different place: behind the camera.

Gareth Higgins 2-25-2019

From ‘The King.’

THERE ARE moments in The King—Eugene Jarecki’s ambitious movie about how the rise and decline of Elvis Presley is a metaphor for America—when the film feels like a prophetic lament. Striking widescreen photography frames an original idea: taking the Rolls Royce that Elvis owned on a nationwide road trip, picking up hitchhikers and celebrities alike to talk about what went wrong.

Parts of it are brilliant: Chuck D lamenting how Elvis appropriated black music and ended up being coronated while “Big Mama” Thornton (for whom Leiber and Stoller wrote “Hound Dog”) remained a marginal figure; John Hiatt gently weeping in the back of the Rolls, his heart heavy at how Elvis “was so trapped”; the housekeeper who found Elvis half-dead on the toilet, and the women who live in one of his early homes, briefly centering the stark contrast between a 20th-century king and 21st-century poverty.

It’s brave and imaginative to include footage of Jarecki’s interviewees criticizing him and the film itself. The Wire creator David Simon says it would have been better to use one of Elvis’ Cadillacs—a more apt metaphor for American decline than the car of a British aristocrat. More challenging is Van Jones asking why Jarecki seems to defend a man who took the music of descendants of enslaved people, accrued enormous power for himself, and didn’t speak up when the nation needed public figures to support civil rights.

Gareth Higgins 11-21-2018

From 'Bad Times at the El Royale.'

WHEN A FILM seems ahead of its time, it’s because its artists are like time travelers, bringing information from the future to illuminate our present. Ideas that lack mainstream consensus (for instance, restorative justice, gift economies, and the flourishing of previously silenced voices in central leadership roles) can manifest in filmmakers’ storytelling as though they are already reality. We leave the theater wishing the world was more like what we were shown. In the future, we may watch the same film and remember how strange it was when the world was different.

Two recent movies that are this kind of prophetic couldn’t be more different from each other in tone but have the same intent: to say something truthful about women who suffer.

Juliet Vedral 11-14-2018

When I was 7 years old, my family began fostering babies. Often these kids would be placed with us after being abandoned just days after they were born. Many of them were never even given a name before their mothers left them at the hospital. When I was about 9 years old, we took in a little boy and his newborn sister. My family eventually adopted them. So, when I screened "Instant Family," starring Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne, so many aspects of the movie rang true: The way the foster children acted out, their desire to be with both their birth mother and their foster parents, and how other people reacted to their family. But what also rang true, and it is a story not often told, is how the kids in foster care are not solely defined by their trauma or their status as “foster kids.”

Abby Olcese 9-13-2018

Reinaldo Marcus Green’s film Monsters and Men is part of an interesting moment in popular culture. It’s one of four films this year to address the relationship between law enforcement and people of color. It’s also one of two movies playing at this years Toronto International Film Festival that deal directly with Black Lives Matter and the killing of black men by police officers.

Juliet Vedral 8-23-2018
Camp Manna

campmannathemovie.com 

Camp Manna is the story about Ian, a young orphaned boy who doesn’t believe in Jesus. He is sent to Camp Manna, a Christian camp led by Jack “Cujo” Parrish (Gary Busey). Once there, he’s placed in a cabin of misfits and forced to participate in the God Games, a camp-wide competition. Antics invariably ensue.

NEARLY 46 YEARS after his death, Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr is never very far from the public eye. He’s already immortal as the originator of the world-famous Serenity Prayer (“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”). And just last fall, an article in Harper’s took up the eternal question: “Where is our Reinhold Niebuhr?” President Obama once called him his favorite philosopher, and Niebuhr is regularly “proof-texted” by polemicists across the political spectrum, especially on questions of war and peace.

In April, PBS will air a documentary, An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story, directed by Martin Doblmeier. It will give an even broader public the chance to reflect on Niebuhr’s significance, in the company of such notables as Cornel West, Stanley Hauerwas, President Jimmy Carter, and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

I was eager to see the film. I’ve always felt that Reinhold Niebuhr was somewhere in my family tree. As a student at a Baptist-related college in the 1970s, I got heavy doses of his book Moral Man and Immoral Society. Later, I had the opportunity to interview Myles Horton, founder of the mother church of Southern radicalism, the Highlander Center, and learned that Horton had studied with Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary. In fact, Niebuhr helped fund Highlander. And about a dozen years after that, I gave one of our sons the middle name Myles, in honor of Horton. So how many degrees of separation is that?

The Editors 4-25-2018
Tuxedos on Ice

Need a cold distraction from summer heat? Love penguins? Want to be inspired by rugged scenery and a field biologist’s enthusiasm for his work, despite harsh conditions, endless counting, and climate change? The documentary film The Penguin Counters is now out on iTunes and DVD. First Run Features

Find What’s Missing

In the picture book Who Counts? 100 Sheep, 10 Coins, and 2 Sons, biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine and children’s book author Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso imaginatively retell three of Jesus’ parables. Suitable for kids 4 to 8. Includes afterword for parents and teachers. Illustrated by Margaux Meganck. Westminster John Knox

An American Story

Amir Hussain’s Muslims and the Making of America is a compact overview of how Muslims have been an intrinsic part of American society, politics, and culture since the colonial era. Released last fall, but timelier than ever as anti-Muslim rhetoric and actions grow. Baylor University Press

Not Alone

In Grieving a Suicide: A Loved One’s Search for Comfort, Answers, and Hope , Albert Y. Hsu explores the hard emotional and spiritual questions survivors face. First published in 2002, this newly revised and expanded version includes updated resources and a discussion guide for suicide-survivor groups. IVP Books

Aysha Khan 3-27-2018

Image via RNS/Eddie Marritz/"Into the Night: Portraits of Life and Death."

Whitney has been drawn to such existential questions since her youth. The collision of what she called her family’s rational and secular Unitarian background with the more traditional Russian Orthodoxy of others in her wider family circle ensured that.