The movie sequel has had a bad rap ever since its inception, and often for good reason. At its worst, the sequel perfectly epitomizes just about everything that is wrong about Hollywood: a cheap money-grab sanctioned by studio executives to satisfy stockholders rather than borne out of any creative and artistic inclinations. They often exploit …
One of the things I hate the most about putting together the end-of-year "Best-Of" list is that it is near-impossible to have any perspective on movies that have only come out months earlier. The victors of these lists often turn out to be the flashiest, most hyped, or, as is often the case with the …
A dirty little secret in Disney movies is that while they have created many great heroes, both male and female, for kids to look up to and emulate it is almost always the villains who are the most interesting characters in whatever movie they end up in. Villains are the characters animators dream about getting …
With Avengers: Infinity War boasting close to two-dozen superheroes and a slew of other non-super characters it is safe to say that it is an ensemble cast movie (and one of the more ambitious ones to boot). The ensemble cast movie, with so many moving pieces to put together, is a notoriously hard type of movie for …
Alice in Wonderland stands as the progenitor of one of the great storytelling traditions where regular humans find themselves stumbling into weird and wonderful fantasy worlds. Sometimes this happens for entirely superflous reasons but frequently these jaunts into the fantasy world help illuminate our own world in profoundly tangential ways. As this list will show, following …
Cinderella, which I revisited this week, is perhaps the archetypal example of the "rags-to-riches" fictional trope. It is a powerful trope because of the hope it inspires. It is the ultimate story of beating the odds against a brutal and unjust system, of someone coming good in spite of the numerous obstacles standing in the …
You may be wondering (probably derisively) why in the world I put out a list of the best movies of 2017 four months into 2018, a full month after the Academy Awards are done, and when the world has generally moved on to other seemingly more important things? The most obvious reason is that due …
"Directed within an inch of its life" is typically not a comment that is complimentary to a movie or its director, and yet that is precisely the best way to generally describe the fantastic filmography of the fantastic director Wes Anderson. While most directors try their best to capture organic acting and want their films …
For a boy born in the 80's like me, there is no way to underestimate just how much of an influence Steven Spielberg had on me growing up. The man is synonymous with blockbuster populist filmmaking and it is shocking to think that in an industry that prizes new things in favour of the old …
The "Christ Figure" is one of the most common tropes of cinema. It also has the reputation, at least among faith and film circles, to be an eye-rolling one because the Christ Figure has propensity to dominate the discussion of any one particular film whenever it is present. But there is something remarkable about the …
Continue reading Best Christ Figures In Movies (Holy Week Special)
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