Tag: religion
The First Omen
Tuesday, April 16th, 2024 Film Reviews,When it appeared in 1976, Richard Donner’s The Omen was acclaimed as one of the all-time great horror films. It was an era of classic horror, led by The Exorcist (1973) and Carrie (1976), movies that still set people raving. Oh my God, these were the scariest things they’d ever seen! If these classics no […]
Heavenly Beings
Saturday, March 23rd, 2024 Art Column,If you’ve been looking for an excuse to immediately fly down to Hobart, look no further. Of all the shows I regret seeing late in the day, and all those that most urgently need to travel to other venues, Heavenly Beings: Icons of the Orthodox Christian World at David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New […]
Women Talking
Friday, February 17th, 2023 Film Reviews,Women Talking proves that dialogue can supercharge a film no less successfully than action. The box office blockbusters of our era are short on talk and long on CGI, hardly more than a few lame jokes and the odd sentence required to introduce the next fight or explosion. Canadian director, Sarah Polley, has reversed this […]
The Dance of Death
Tuesday, October 12th, 2021 Art Column,Every era responds to a crisis in its own way. Our answer to COVID-19 has been to bunker down, trust in science, and wait out the worst of it. In the late Middle Ages, when Europe was devastated by the Black Death, it was widely believed the illness was sent by God as punishment for […]
Corpus Christi
Friday, October 23rd, 2020 Film Reviews,According to that famous former nun, Karen Armstrong: “The great sages of religion have always said that you don’t start out deciding metaphysical questions about the existence of God or the viability of the resurrection. You first live in a certain way.” Polish director, Jan Komasa, provides a dramatic illustration of this idea in Corpus […]
The Children Act
Thursday, December 6th, 2018 Film Reviews,It’s a big year at the movies for Ian McEwan, a novelist who seems to enjoy pulling the carpet out from under his protagonists. In August we had On Chesil Beach, adapted by McEwan from his own novel of 2007. Now he has written a screenplay for The Children Act, published in 2014. McEwan is […]
The Blake Prize 2018
Thursday, May 31st, 2018 Art Column,It’s been seven years since I last wrote about the Blake Prize, which seemed to have reached a point where it couldn’t get any worse. The good news is that it hasn’t gotten worse: it’s just as bad as it was seven years ago. When it was founded in 1951 the Blake Prize was intended […]
The Other Side of Hope & Paul: Apostle of Christ
Friday, April 6th, 2018 Film Reviews,In pre-Enlightenment days ‘history’ was a mass of tall stories, myths and rumours. Authors were happy to recount tales of miracles and supernatural events, readers were happy to believe them. In the mid-1800s it was still scandalous when writers such as David Strauss and Ernst Renan began to challenge the historical basis of the Bible, […]
Mary Magdalene
Friday, March 23rd, 2018 Film Reviews,Of all the figures in the New Testament, Mary Magdalene has been the most misunderstood. This is partly because early commentators found it hard to distinguish between Mary of Magdala, Mary of Bethany, and the ‘sinful’ woman in the Gospel of St. Luke, who anoints Jesus’s feet in Simon’s house and dries them with her […]
White Rabbit: Ritual Spirit
Friday, October 6th, 2017 Art Column,Last week I was in China meeting artists from each end of the contemporary art spectrum. In Suzhou I saw a breathtaking show of brush-and-ink painting by Li Huayi (b.1948) an artist who has divided his life between China and San Francisco. In Shanghai I visited Xu Zhen (b.1977), one of the most successful artists […]