[Caution: This article on The Wolfman contains significant plot spoilers.] I’ve just seen The Wolfman, Hollywood’s 2010 treatment of the classic nineteenth-century horror story. If I recommend it, those who believe that all God-fearing people should steer clear of horror movies will come after me with torches. They’ll be joined by my film-reviewing colleagues, who…

[Caution: This article on The Wolfman contains significant plot spoilers.] I’ve just seen The Wolfman, Hollywood’s 2010 treatment of the classic nineteenth-century horror story. If I recommend it, those who believe that all God-fearing people should steer clear of horror movies will come after me with torches. They’ll be joined by my film-reviewing colleagues, who…

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood …And let my cry come unto Thee. —From Ash Wednesday, T. S. Eliot Is it possible to recognize my neighbor’s faults unless I’m similarly wounded? The damnable fruit, after all, comes from a tree of knowledge of good and evil. I can spot a hypocrite because I…

In his 1999 Letter to Artists, Pope John Paul II cites the words of the Polish poet, Cyprian Norwid: “beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work is to raise us up.” He goes on to refresh our memory of the Platonic notion that beauty resides in the good and the good in beauty.…

I’ve just seen a hell of a film. Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective—hailed as the latest masterpiece of the Romanian New Wave—is likely to convince American moviegoers that they should avoid the Romanian New Wave. The movie moves at a snail’s pace. (The most energetic scene in the film is a ponderous conversation in an office.)…

I didn’t play King Herod this year. That role—which my father occupied in my youth and is now all mine!—is a coveted cameo in our family’s annual Epiphany play, full of transparently feigned concern for the welfare of an unexpected (and for Herod, most unwanted) newborn king. Regrettably, we had no time this year for…

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes…. —Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” There seems to be a deep psychotic guilt in the heart of America, a feeling that crops up at times like these when…

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes…. —Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” There seems to be a deep psychotic guilt in the heart of America, a feeling that crops up at times like these when…

The most beautiful things in Ghana are green oranges: as pale and dimpled as hedge apples from an Osage Orange and oblong, as if shaped by hand. When I walk home in the evenings, I pass the girls selling green oranges at wooden tables along the road, each arranging twelve of her best on the…

Students of language learn delightful words for which no good English equivalent exists: sehnsucht (German), poshlost (Russian), or duende (Spanish); rich bottomlands of human experience—good and bad—left inexplicably fallow by Anglo-Saxons. Even when stolen wholesale into English, such words are like the Elgin marbles: mysterious though denuded of context, at once beautiful and broken. A…