"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

"One night early in my Pokémon journey, I spotted about twenty young adults gathered, phones in hand, around an equestrian statue in Tompkins Square Park. Apparently there were a lot of uncommon Pokémon in the area. I opened up the app: The park was indeed hopping with imaginary creatures. I tried to catch one (a Doduo) while the most outgoing member of this impromptu group of Pokémon trainers showed me a video on his phone: the highly-ambitious concept trailer for the game.

"Pokémon Go is reshaping pedestrianism in Manhattan. Unlike many video games, it is not played by someone indoors and stationary, but by people walking around and interacting with landmarks and with other people—players will greet strangers in the streets to share tips about where to find specific Pokémon. Pokémon Go transforms urban environments into arenas of communal play and discovery, by turning points-of-interest like public art and monuments into hubs where players con

"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

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

With Acculturated gone from the internet, I am reposting some of my Acculturated articles here, in their entirety. Enjoy. Not since the Anthony Hopkins’ brutally cultured Hannibal Lecter has a screen villain so frightened, enthralled, and twistedly delighted audiences. Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight will go down in history as a film-stealing antagonist, but perhaps for all the wrong reasons. In my previous columns on Superman and Batman, I looked at how the themes

With Acculturated gone from the internet, I am reposting some of my Acculturated articles here, in their entirety. Enjoy. Quite possibly the most popular and profitable superhero of all time, Batman casts a long shadow over popular culture. The word “shadow” is not chosen unwittingly; unlike the sun-powered and brightly-colored Superman, the subject of the first post in this series, Batman is a creature of the night, a man who uses the shadows to turn fear against the fearmon