Awards make me uncomfortable.
The Oscars take place this Sunday, and I can’t think of a more brazen example of self-glorification in contemporary America. Don’t get me wrong, I love watching the Academy Awards, and maybe if I ever won something like an Oscar or a Pulitzer Prize or a Nobel I’d feel differently about this [...]

It verges on blasphemy to question “The Blind Side.”
Not only has the movie garnered Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Actress, it has also made an unexpected $241 million – and counting. What’s more, the picture has been wholeheartedly embraced by scores of American churchgoers. Sermons are even being fashioned around it.
I thought the [...]

God doesn’t make an appearance in “Wings of Desire,” a 1987 art film with angels that has been recently rereleased by Criterion on DVD, yet the movie still made me reconsider the way He might view the world. Maybe, just maybe, we occasionally entertain Him.
Directed by German filmmaker Wim Wenders, “Wings of Desire” is set [...]

The Vatican doesn’t think much of Avatar. And frankly neither do I.
When the film opened in Italy, the Vatican offered a review.  A Philadelphia Daily News columnist covering the release wrote:
The Vatican newspaper and radio station are criticizing James Cameron’s billion-dollar 3-D blockbuster for flirting with the idea that worship of nature can replace religion [...]

Now that I’m done haggling with myself over the top 10 films of 2009, I can look back at my list and see certain trends and patterns emerge.
One way you could group the movies I’ve selected is in terms of the Biblical virtues they extol.
Three of the pictures on my list chart the emergence of [...]

In a roundabout way, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is an appropriate movie for the holidays.
Director Wes Anderson has adapted Roald Dahl’s 1970 children’s novel into an exquisite exercise in stop-motion animation. The story is told with miniature puppets, but otherwise largely remains the same. After thieving from three farmers one too many times, the title character [...]

The television commercial for the end-of-the-world extravaganza “2012” – complete with images of the earth being covered in a flood – prompted the following theological discussion between my 7 and 4-year-old daughters.
“Look at all the water,” the younger one observed, her big eyes even larger than usual.
“Don’t worry,” the older one reassured her. “God promised [...]

What does “The Wizard of Oz” mean to you?
We have occasion to ask because yet another edition of the 1939 classic has been released on DVD, this time to celebrate the movie’s 70th anniversary.
“The Wizard of Oz” has maintained classic status for all those years because kids return to it as adults, both to share [...]

I’m not sure where it started – perhaps studio publicists initially fed the convenient misinformation – but nearly every review of “A Serious Man” has described the film as a modern version of the Book of Job.
It makes me wonder if anyone has read Job lately.
Sure, the central figure in “A Serious Man,” the latest [...]

There is a reason we laugh so eagerly at zombies, as audiences have been gleefully doing with the horror comedy “Zombieland.”
Is there a more fitting symbol for our own inescapable mortality than zombies – decaying, dismembered figures that relentlessly pursue the living? Zombies have officially haunted us since 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead,” but [...]