Religion can be a beautiful thing. It can also be very dangerous. In The Student, we see how someone can misuse religion in destructive ways. It may be all the harder for some of us to watch because it is Christianity that is made into something ugly. Venya, a Russian...
The tag line for the Newport Beach Film Festival this year is ?Go Deeper.? It no doubt refers to the idea that independent films may have a deeper meaning that more commercial films. (Although we at Screenfish often look at popular commercial films for deep...
?God knows what is in my heart. He doesn?t need me to be in pews to remind him.? While watching A Quiet Passion I was struck by how well Emily Dickinson (Cynthia Nixon) would fit in with today?s ?spiritual but not religious? sentiment. Her thoughts (and poetry) were...
The Transfiguration is a different kind of vampire movie. But then it?s not really a vampire movie because we don?t have any of the undead who cannot stand the sun and are killed with a stake. Rather we have a disturbed teen who is obsessed with vampires and sees the...
It was twenty-five years ago this month that Los Angeles erupted in a violent civil disturbance. Many people remember it as a response to the acquittal of four police officers who were involved in beating Rodney King. While that verdict was an important component of...
It is rare that a film can seem to be poetry, and that may be even more difficult when the film has no dialogue. Yet The Red Turtle manages to be just that. It certainly has the elements of myth and legend, but it is at its core the story of humanity as seen in a man...
I recently had a chance to take part in a small round table interview with The Promise director and co-writer Terry George and producer Eric Esrailian. The film is set in the Armenian Genocide that took place in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. This is a...
Family is the central theme of Born in China, this year?s Earth Day offering from Disneynature. The last few years they have focused on a single kind of animal (Monkey Kingdom, Bears, African Cats) and shown their lives and environment. This year they take us to...
?Our revenge will be to survive.? The modern concept of genocide did not begin with the Holocaust; it started with the attempted extermination of the Armenians during the early years of World War I. The Promise tells the horrifying tale through the story of a love...