Cults · Horror · Religion & Spirituality · War
Rosemary’s Baby has been seen as eerily prescient, predictive, but in fact it looked back; Polanski already knew evil and horror, and specifically the horror of the giant covens of[…]
Drama · Religion & Spirituality · Writers & Critics
Graham Greene could be a very political writer (nowhere more than in The Quiet American, which was his next major work after The End of the Affair), but Christianity has[…]
Experimental & Underground · Religion & Spirituality · Women in Film
The volition of these dancers is as clear as the sense that it is not their own. Deren mirrors this depersonalization masterfully; her camera splits a man between his reflections,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Colonialism · Drama · Essays · Historical & Epic · Philosophy · Religion & Spirituality · Writers & Critics
Near the close of our Skype meeting, my conversation with James Fox turned inside out. He enquired if he could ask me a question. He then tried to assemble the[…]
Drama · Essays · Religion & Spirituality
Dare to step together into an “usness” that has no guarantees but the shared vision of belonging, whose embers you agree to slowly tend. History provides the furnishings that are[…]
Drama · Religion & Spirituality · War
Overt spirituality is often undermined in this film by bizarrely comic episodes from everyday life. Certainly the most bizarre plot element concerns the Glue Man – someone who attacks young[…]
Historical & Epic · Religion & Spirituality
Risen is the product of a sub-industry whose primary source of success is in providing pious pablum for a complacent and undiscriminating Christian market (although, to be fair, this market[…]
Animation · Animators · Experimental & Underground · Religion & Spirituality
In her two longest works of animation – Sita Sings the Blues (2008) and Seder Masochism (2018, currently on the festival circuit) – Nina Paley turns her sharp wit and[…]
Documentaries · Philosophy · Religion & Spirituality
“All time exists all the time” – from the documentary What Is Reality? * * * Emancipate yourself from the tunnel-visioned timekeeper! Return the unbending arrow of time to its[…]
Horror · Philosophy · Religion & Spirituality
We will go back to our old gods again. – Goethe * * * My eyes. My eyes. I’m seeing again. Across a gulf of how-many years, the light is[…]
Experimental & Underground · Horror · Philosophy · Religion & Spirituality · Romance
Whatever else it is, mother! is ultimately a woman’s anxious nightmare about what it feels like to put your heart and soul into creating something only for people to take[…]
Drama · Memoir · Religion & Spirituality · Women in Film
Both protagonists undertake a kind of “work of the self,” whereby they simultaneously come to terms with trauma – in one case, paternal betrayal, in the other, maternal abandonment by[…]
Documentaries · Religion & Spirituality
Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2016) can be read as a brilliant subversion of the colonising role that the camera plays in appropriating native cultures in favour of Western[…]
Religion & Spirituality · TV & Streaming
The esoteric spiritualism of Pope Lenny brings God crashing to earth. God is impotent; if God is in everything, then God is as sacred as the flotsam of the world,[…]
Essays · Horror · Religion & Spirituality
If the evil spirit is “seen,” that is, reflected . . . he is overcome. – Marie-Louise von Franz Unmask Satan, and you vanquish him. – St. Augustine * *[…]
Directors · Film Technology & History · Historical & Epic · Pre-Code · Religion & Spirituality · Silents
This post was adapted from the new book by Cecilia de Mille Presley and Mark A. Vieira, Cecil B. DeMille: The Art of the Hollywood Epic (Running Press, 416pp, December[…]
Documentaries · Religion & Spirituality
“Real things happening to real people”
Documentaries · Essays · LGBT & Queer · Religion & Spirituality
Who will judge the judges trembling before sex? The atheists!
