"Logan wears its influences on its sleeve: Director James Mangold has his characters watch scenes of Shane on a hotel TV, and Johnny Cash plays over the credits. Here is the superhero as aging gunslinger, a midnight rider who knows God’s gonna cut him down. And it works. The scenes of familial bonding among the odd trio of Logan, Xavier, and Laura are surprisingly touching. The best part is seeing Logan, once a feral berserker, gruffly instruct the lab-raised Laura on the nic

"Judas hanged himself after betraying Jesus. Kichijiro turns himself in to be locked up with Rodrigues. The other imprisoned Christians shun Kichijiro, huddling in one corner of a cell to leave him isolated in the other. He is a sinner who has lost the trust of his brethren and must ask absolution from the very priest he double-crossed. And yet he has not despaired. He dares to believe God’s promises that He can forgive even him. After his apostasy, Rodrigues sees a new kinsh

At First Things, I'm featured on both segments of this podcast. In the first segment, I talk about Silence (the book and the film) with Julia Yost. In the second segment, Leah and I join Julia to discuss the BBC's Sherlock, and the ways it went wrong by making its world too small—we end by imagining what guest star from a different author's detective stories could help cure the increasingly solipsistic world of Sherlock. Listen to the whole podcast below: #Podcast #FirstThin

"Arrival stars Amy Adams as a linguist named Louise Banks who is tasked with learning how to speak to the aliens who have arrived in monolithic ships all over the earth. Her military handlers, suspicious of the extraterrestrials’ intentions, want her to do this without teaching them English. Adams convincingly plays a gifted scholar who is in over her head, until she starts seeing the world from the aliens’ viewpoint and gets glimpses beyond the limits of human consciousness.

"With Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, director David Yates and Harry Potter scribe J. K. Rowling welcome us back into the Wizarding World—and this time, they let a Muggle like us play a main character. Fantastic Beasts stars waifish magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) but the show is stolen by magic-less interloper Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) and his admirable, openhearted curiosity. Wizards in Prohibition-era New York, where the movie is set, are a suspici

"Kubo and the Two Strings, the latest concoction from Laika Studios, will blow you away with its gorgeous stop-motion animation. But it will also inspire you with its compassionate story. The movie weaves a rollicking adventure yarn, but it also subverts the expected ending of a hero slaying a monster. Instead, true victory in the movie is portrayed as loving one’s enemy enough to give him a better story to tell about himself. As the tale begins, Kubo (Art Parkinson) is a bud

"Grace’s father Mr. Meacham (Robert Redford, with the kindliest of twinkles in his eye) is a teller of tall tales, but she never believed his stories about meeting a dragon in the woods. But as Pete reveals more details about Elliot, Grace gives her dad another chance to convince her. The stage is set for a variation on a well-known trope of skepticism: the “invisible dragon” argument from Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World. Sagan posits a conversation between a believer an

"Films with a theological bent never get far from the oldest question of theodicy: Why does a loving God allow his children to suffer? It’s the rare film that offers any nuance in its answer. In films that make the point that God can bring good out of evil, there is always a danger of becoming facile and condescending—an unexpected blessing proves that it was all for the best, and the evil wasn’t so bad to begin with. The Innocents, by contrast, offers evidence of healing and

In my first appearance on the God and Comics podcast, I chat with Fr. Jonathan, Fr. Matt, and Fr. Kyle about Captain America: Civil War and the questions it raises about law and morality. When should we defy the edicts of our government? How does Captain America relate to Martin Luther King, Jr.? Listen to the podcast here #Podcast #GodandComics #Film #Superheroes

I reviewed The Force Awakens for First Things: "Every time the new Star Wars film tried to be bigger than the last one (with “the last one” here meaning both previous Star Wars trilogies) it disappointed. A Death Star, after all, is a Death Star, even if you engorge its size and call it a Starkiller Base. We’ve seen that space battle already. What worked in the film, what impressed me and excited me, were the moments when it went small. The heroes of the movie were instantly