As a purely anecdotal aside, I’d like to mention that few of the people I know who’ve walked the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrim trail that provides the setting for Emilio Estevez’ film The Way, were actually Catholic, or even appreciably Christian. The Camino has become, in an age of widened horizons but jaded palettes, a kind of extreme tourism destination, [...]
The Way, a low-budget movie starring Martin Sheen, one of the most radical left-wing activists in Hollywood, has won unstinting praise from conservatives like Laura Ingraham, a prominent talk-show host in the United States. At the conclusion of an interview with Sheen and his son, Emilio Estevez, the movie’s writer and director , Ingraham enthused: “There are not many films that I [...]
In early March, the usual Hollywood types gathered at the usual Hollywood Oscar event and gave the usual people the usual awards. Avatar didn’t win much, but it hardly matters – it’s the most financially successful movie in the history of cinema. It’s also anti-Christian, anti-human and bursting with pagan and anti-life concepts and constructs. Set in 2154, it concerns [...]
There are a few rules about reviewing movies that no one can teach you – that only become evident after you’ve sat through many hundreds of hours of films you probably didn’t enjoy and written reviews that, taken as a whole, provide evidence of a life in the midst of being wasted. Some apply generally to the whole history of moviemaking and [...]
My career choice hasn’t been a gateway to riches, but it has a few perks, one of which is the appearance of dozens of DVD screeners in my mailbox in the weeks before Christmas. “Academy screeners” is their full name – DVDs of movies made for members of the Motion Picture Academy of America so that members can nominate Oscar winners without [...]
No doubt you could be excused for considering Hollywood to be a synonym for vice and a film festival an excuse to air all the freshest depravities of the film industry. For example, you may have been following the most prestigious film festival in the world, the Cannes, which recently awarded “Best Screenplay” to a movie centered on homosexual adultery. [...]
Rick McGinnis reviews Sam Mendes’ ‘Revolutionary Road’, which offers typical Hollywood fare on the 1950s.
The producer and co-writer of the award-winning pro-life movie Bella, Leo Severino, was in Ontario Feb. 14-16 to give a preview to select groups before the movie is officially released in Canada. He was originally invited to speak at the fourth annual Culture of Life Student Leadership Conference in Hamilton, but that grew from just a one-day engagement to three days of pre-screenings [...]
When I first saw a trailer for the film Juno some months back, a silent alarm was triggered; here was the story of a 16-year-old girl (played by Canadian Ellen Page) who finds herself pregnant at the hands of a schoolmate, stomached with a “doodle that can’t be un-did,” as the witty clerk at the drugstore informs her (The Office’s Rainn Wilson). Although [...]
"Hassan!” I called. “Come back with it!” He was already turning the street corner, his rubber boots kicking up snow. He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “For you, a thousand times over!” he said. So opens the pivotal event in The Kite Runner, a novel by Khaled Hosseini. The movie version, which is now in theatres, was nominated for [...]
One word summarizes The Golden Compass, a movie based upon the first book of anti-Christian and pro-atheist children’s author Philip Pullman. This word is boring. I initially intended to avoid the movie. However, I had just co-authored Pied Piper of Atheism: Philip Pullman and Children’s Fantasy (AtheismForChildren.com), a new book by Ignatius Press that forewarns parents and pastors about the spiritual dangers [...]
Bella, the heart-warmingindependent film that took the 2006 Toronto Film Festival by storm, has now officially secured a major distributor for U.S. audiences. The Hollywood Reporterconfirms a July 26 scoop by LifeSiteNews.com that had reported Bellawould be released nationwide in U.S. theatres by Oct. 26 by a major distributor. Metanoia Films, the producer, finalized the contract with the distributor. Now, it is [...]
I once heard an African-American southern gospel singer – whose name I cannot recall – preface his rendition of a beloved hymn by pointing out that it can be played on just the black keys of a piano. He claimed this approximated the pentatonic scale indigenous to west Africa. Then, he went on to speculate that the captain of a slaver transporting [...]
I may have been one of only a handful of reviewers in the Western world who bought and read the novel The Children of Men before seeing the film of the same title, released in North America on Christmas Day. Given their mutual premise – a near-future world of total human infertility and the rebirth of hope in the person of an unborn [...]
Capote Directed by Bennett Miller. Rated: R Review by Hilary White Reporter The Oscar-nominated film Capote opens with a long, still shot of the Kansas prairies creating the backdrop to a solitary farmhouse in which a young woman discovers the bodies of the Clutter family, murdered by two drifters, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. The murders and the two men become Truman [...]