Beliefnet, a website dedicated to multi-faith dialogue, has announced its nominees for Best Spiritual Film, Best Spiritual Performance and Best Spiritual Documentary. I was asked to be one of the judges. There are five nominees in each category, and each nominees is accompanied by an argument “for” and an argument “against” the particular film in […]

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Believe it or not, I had never attended a concert until U2’s Vertigo Tour a few years ago. Somehow, I made it into my 30s without ever partaking in this aural right of passage. The concert was music and magic on a titanic scale, something more akin to a religious experience than entertainment. It was […]

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Until 2005’s dark and engrossing Match Point, one might have been forgiven for thinking Woody Allen’s creative career was at an end. But the taut morality play seemed to herald a new and lauded direction in Allen’s career.
Some accused the London-based drama of being a philosophical carbon copy of Allen’s earlier work, Crimes and Misdemeanors, […]

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If Oprah ran a movie club and Untraceable managed to find its way onto her list, she would find herself embroiled in yet another scandal. Untraceable is a crime thriller that pillages the Hollywood storehouse, plagiarizing far better films than itself, and cutting and pasting entire scenes until something resembling a new movie remains.

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It’s hard to believe that audiences were first introduced to John Rambo back in 1982. A rousing populist fable that reflected the public’s growing discontentment with the political establishment, Rambo: First Blood told the story of a disenfranchised Vietnam vet who took on an entire Oregon town after being falsely imprisoned. The film went on […]

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The complete list of nominees:

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When I was very young, I had an affinity for ants. When misguided school friends would kick at anthills, I always reprimanded them, asking what they would feel like if a giant appeared and smashed their home to bits. J.J. Abrams (the wunderkind creator of TV’s Lost) must have been spying on my friends and […]

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Cinematic formulas are plumbed time and again because they’ve proven Darwin’s conjecture that natural selection weeds out weakness and rewards vigor and stamina. They certainly aren’t the most creative, original or most interesting kids on the block, nor will they ever taste greatness, but the predecessors on which they’ve shaped themselves have endured precisely because […]

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