
The Top 10 (Non-Religious) Religious Films of 2017
Cinema and religion are never far apart—both bring light to darkened places. Sometimes the illumination…
Read MoreCinema and religion are never far apart—both bring light to darkened places. Sometimes the illumination…
Read MoreDespite its possible roots in Christian lore (the death of Jesus having occurred on a…
Read MoreCalvary posits that faith is mostly a fear of death, but in reality, like Gleeson’s performance, faith is a living, changing, malleable thing. His Father James helps us understand why people still need religion.
Read MoreStructured around a family (mother, father, three children) which suffers a terrible loss, The Tree of Life is an extended midrash, or commentary, on the Book of Job, a verse of which forms the epigraph to the film and which is sermonized upon during an extended scene at a church. At once essentially Catholic and doggedly scientific in its worldview, its central family becomes an archetype, undergoing processes of childlike wonderment, Oedipal lust and rage, the loss of innocence, the loss of faith, and finally, it seems, redemption.
Read MoreTwo very different films about what happens after we die are in the theaters right now: Clint Eastwood’s gentle Hereafter and Gaspar Noe’s raw, hallucinatory Enter the Void. While covering the same cosmological territory, the films couldn’t be more different, stylistically, thematically, and religiously.
Read MoreRD columnist S. Brent Plate crosses disciplinary boundaries to show us how film creates worlds, just as religion does; through incantation or special effects anything is possible.
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