Editorial Note: The digital download of Dunkirk releases today and the DVD releases next week. This is Pastor Steve Sanchez’s original review from his blog, Stone the Preacher. —————————————————————————————————————- I recently saw the excellent film Dunkirk yet was saddened when I learned the filmmakers got everything right except for the true hero of the story....
Anyone who has read my reviews of Christian films knows that generally, I’m not a fan. The writing is usually very bad, the acting is often even worse, and they usually look (and sound) like they were shot in a church gymnasium. They are often sappy, unrealistic, and so obviously evangelistic that they shouldn’t really...
The Hunger Games. Mad Max: Fury Road. Left Behind. Wait, Left Behind? What’s a Christian work of fiction doing among those secular entertainments? Well, they all have one overriding theme: Pessimism. In The Hunger Games the world ends and afterward we all end up hunting and killing each other. In Mad Max: Fury Road the...
A week or so ago Dr. Joel McDurmon (American Vision) and Pastor Jordan Hall (Pulpit and Pen Sermon Audio broadcast) debated the topic, Is the civil law of God obligatory for all nations? As you might guess, McDurmon argued in the affirmative and Hall the negative. In an amazing feat of speed-production, Marcus Pittman of...
Peter Jackson so placed his indelible artistic stamp on his Lord of the Rings trilogy that when he decided to film the first Middle-Earth book, The Hobbit, comparisons were inevitable. The books themselves don’t invite such comparisons; J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit before The Lord of the Rings. However, in Movie-Land, prequels are the new...
When adapting a trilogy of books, it probably doesn’t make much sense to make four movies. The final book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was split up into two movies, and both movies taken together are much more successful than their individual parts. Since Mockingjay, Part 2 is still...
Every time I mention The Walking Dead, I am hit with two or three people who try and rebuke me for watching a show that, in their words, “glorifies death and evil.” If you don’t believe me, just read the comments of this blog post. Those guys will be proving their inability to understand narrative...
The rebooted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has arrived in theaters. Another beloved franchise is updated for the summer of 2014 following the heels of recent rebooted franchises STAR TREK, TRANSFORMERS, BATMAN, and G. I. JOE. It is the latest to join the ” Produced By Michael Bay” label that has all the glitz and glamour...
I’ve been known to have an upturned nose when it comes to Christian films. When talking about Christian films, I tend to default to Jay Sherman: I hated it. Let’s just face it. Christian films are terrible-mainly because Christian films are never really attempts to be films. Instead, they are usually overly-priced Gospel tracts. But...
The Book Thief (2013) is a mostly uninspired and only intermittently compelling movie of tiresome length, confusing and frustrating every hope I had entertained of the original volume’s bittersweet tragedy being skillfully adapted to the screen. Markus Zusak’s young adult novel of the same name was both starkly tragic and sweetly human, relieving its dark...
