It is worth noting that the English translation of Ordet, a 1955 film by Danish director Carl-Theodor Dreyer, is The Word. It plays much like a parable: the message may not be immediately apparent, but allow the heart to dwell on it, and the soul will stir an answer – an answer that can’t always

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?…When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” It is this passage from Job, this great riddle, that begins the film “The Tree of Life,” director Terrence Malick’s most daring and rewarding film to date. So often, the

Claire Denis, the director of the 2010 film White Material, is a connoisseur of imagery – imagery that mesmerizes, imagery that perturbs and, above all, imagery that belies truth. Any review of a film by Denis – once an understudy to such cinematic originals as Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch – would be null if

I was drawn to the BBC television series A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by a review of the book by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. Williams’ endorsement: “This book is a landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight even for the most jaded professional and

If matters were fast and friendly at Ridgemont, they are far harder and frantic at Douglass. The great irony of Douglass is that in times where separate but equal was the standard, it was the exception; and when times are no longer separate but equal, it is – as the film declares – “separate and