In 2010, I had the privilege of leading the Film Seminar at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was a student posing as an instructor, a film enthusiast more interested in learning about movies from classroom discussion than in expounding upon my own movie-going experience. Still, it caught me by surprise to learn…

It happens every January—movie ads fill up with boasts about awards they’ve won. Soon, those boasts will include Oscar nominations. And The Artist is currently the most boastful of all. Filmmaker Michael Hazanavicius’s tribute to Hollywood’s silent film era is stirring up enthusiasm among audiences and critics alike. Me, I enjoyed it. It was playful,…

Ever since Greg Wolfe started a Facebook thread about the movie, I’ve been thinking about Tree of Life—particularly the section depicting the birth of the universe. At first it appears to be a cinematic non-sequitur, and it seems also never to end. It does end, after almost twenty minutes away from the narrative. The big bang…

Was there a horse story in your childhood? My wife Anne cherished Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, C.W. Anderson’s The Blind Connemara, and Marguerite Henry’s Stormy and White Stallion of Lipizza. When she wasn’t reading about horses, she was riding them. In the saddle by the time she was in elementary school, Anne rode both English…

[Note: This post contains a spoiler for the film Melancholia in the last paragraph.] Sometimes it sidles up to you, out of the corner of your eye. You catch a glimpse and turn your head: Was that it? Nah. Like a mouse scurrying around that we don’t accept as an actual rodent until the fifth…

To tame a lion, you need a good chair. That’s one of the lessons that Dave Hoover, a wild animal trainer, shares in Errol Morris’s documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. Why a chair? Because, he explains, a cat has only one point of interest. If a lion’s charging at you, it’s best to…

The movie The Help has been out almost a month by now, but the surrounding hubbub seems in no way to be subsiding. Heated discussions about the film and its portrayal of the early civil rights era have raged across the internet, the style sections of the newspaper, and public radio call-in programs. Based on…

Doc Brown might disagree, but Hollywood says you don’t need a DeLorean to visit the past. This summer, your local cineplex is offering time travel at twelve bucks a ticket. In my last Good Letters post, I noticed that most 2011 moviegoers are visiting old familiar faces—Captain Jack Sparrow, the Transformers, the Muppets, Magneto, the…

Last week, I witnessed the Big Bang. More specifically—I enjoyed a sneak preview of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. The film’s publicity company will chop off my hands if I publish a review before opening day. But I’ll tell you this: Malick’s movie did more than catapult me back in time to witness the…

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader—Walden Media’s third Narnia movie—portrays one of the fiercest battles you’re ever likely to see at the movies. I’m not talking about blades and arrows (although even C. S. Lewis would be alarmed at how much violence occurs in big-screen Narnia). No, I’m talking about wars…