2011‑2022, and is preserved here for archival purposes.
Evan Menzies reports on the end of a Star Wars season that left the series’ fans awash in waterworks over a tale of fatherly love.
With the second season of the Mandalorian wrapped, many both young and old reported sniffly noses and leaky tear ducts on Star Wars fan boards and on social media.
You can count me as one of them. I think it’s safe to assume for the overwhelming maj...
Sacha Baron Cohen’s sequel satirizing America’s cultural moment is at once crude and convincing yet suffers from a cruel refusal to see those it mocks as human, Josh Nadeau writes.
Like many other North Americans trying to make the best of the pandemic’s second wave, I sat down last week and watched Amazon Prime’s latest sensation: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. It’s a sequel to 2006’s Borat, which saw comedian Sacha Ba...
Having sat on the edge of his seat during the movie 1917, John Robson writes the film depicts a war story with likeable characters and requisite tension.
There are so many ways 1917 could have gone wrong that it’s a miracle that it didn’t. I’m talking about the movie. But it also applies to the year, which seems an unlikely setting for a riveting, harrowing, yet ultimately heartwarming adventure tal...
Last week, Editor-in-Chief Father Raymond de Souza dismissed Oscar-nominated Black Panther as a cinematic sop to Hollywood guilt and greed. Tut-tut, retorts reviewer Hannah Marazzi. It’s a marvel of movie-making beauty that leaves viewers vibrant with its message of mercy.
Image: Marvel Studios/Walt Disney
This piece is a response to Fr. Raymond de Souza's Convivium article from last week, Hollywood's Guild of Many Colo...
Children remind us not to look backward in nostalgia, but to look forward to a freedom that childhood merely prefigures, writes author Jennifer Trafton. The Mary Poppins sequel is a piece of art that unpacks the variety of gifts that imagination offers—and the freedom it promises.
This piece was originally published in The Rabbit Room.
My husband is a crier in movies; I am not. Occasionally something w...
Convivium writer Rachel DeBruyn finds The Greatest Showman fails to exploit its richest asset: the outcasts who stepped from the shadows into the spotlight. Yet the film is salvaged by one curmudgeonly character getting at its would-be heart in an unexpected way.
The Greatest Showman has all the ingredients for a spectacular, heart warming show: an exhilarating soundtrack co-written by the duo behind the music of ...
Josh Nadeau finds virtue in the signals sent by superhero cinema.
Looking back at some of the highest-grossing films last year, one can certainly see a pattern: Spider-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor, Wonder Woman. And it’s no blip – box office returns from the decade so far have all...
Viewers of the latest Star Wars installment watch the ancient religion of The Force droop like an old agnostic’s shrug, writes Convivium contributor Evan Menzies
Please note that the following article contains significant spoilers about what unfolds in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
One of the most enjoyable features of the Star Wars saga has always been its ability to lean into the mysteries of the Force...
In Stephen Chbosky’s film Wonder, Convivium reviewer Erik de Lange finds the Gospel message on love of Other
When I was Grade 3, my family moved to a town that was two hours away. I distinctly remember visiting day at the new school. Sitting through class, I was already dreading lunch. The 15-minute recess was bad enough. I felt lost and forlorn, like a fish out o...
Director Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is far more than a sequel to the 1982 classic about robot rebellion. It recovers from the dregs of techno-saturated hedonism, Convivium reviewer Stephen Porter writes, a theology of the body making dignity inseparable from sexuality ordered toward life
In a society frequently left wanting of wonder, science fiction has emerged as a refuge for the modern audience. Information is increasingly well within our grasp, and our understanding the world around us grows exponentially in ever-decreasing increments o...
At screenings of two seemingly very different movies, writer Dayna Slusar finds commonality in their evocation of home, and ponders the word’s enduring power for a culture increasingly lost in its hopeless little screens.
When you think of the word ‘home’ do you think of a place? A person? A mental state? A feeling? Home can mean different things to different people. Home can be an arriving, a searching, a resting place. Home can be a conflict of two places you want to be, b...
Convivium asked Calgary scholars, Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe to watch Dunkirk and then talk about its effect on them. Here's what they had to say.
Hollywood’s finest most manipulative marketing minds couldn’t have created a moment more perfectly timed for release of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk.
Nazis – at least of the neo variety – assaulting the landscape. Swarming violence arising wi...
Did you see the film Silence? Toronto-based writer Gavin C. Miller gives Convivium readers a review and seeks to debunk wide spread misconceptions that may be held about the film.
Martin Scorsese’s recent movie Silence, based on the Shusaku Endo novel, remains topical as it moves into Netflix land. Frankly, I was reluctant to even see it in the theatre. While there are a few shining counter-examples, most movies about religi...
Father Raymond J de Souza takes a look at empathy in the broader context of today's entertainment industry and socio-political sphere.
On Friday the curtain lifts on the greatest reality show of them all, Celebrity White House. Courtesy of social media, the whole world is invited to the spectacle of Donald Trump as president. For the past two months, his election victory has brought – as t...
Publisher Peter Stockland reviews recently released film Hidden Figures and examines the nature of a forgiveness that continues to honour pain and hard truths.
Visiting Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change once, I overheard a black boy ask his mother: “Why were white people so bad to us?”
It was neither a surprising nor unreasonable question. The King Centre’s detailing of ra...
There’s a sadness that runs through Richard Linklater’s recent film Boyhood, one that’s hard to put your finger on. Shot over twelve years—yes, twelve years!—the film traces the life of Mason Evans (...
In The Atlantic this week, Leah Reich shares an interesting story about Tofu, a twitter bot designed to read your tweets and then tweet back to you. People who have actually engaged with the bot were often surprised with its uncanny ability to understand them better than many "real" people ever did.
Doug Sikkema reviews Joseph Gordon-Levitt's beautiful short film, Flickering Lights, which invites viewers to become participants in a collage of moments where the subtle play of light both arrests and moves the viewer.
Did you know there are over 35 adjectives in English just to describe light? It can be coruscating or crepuscular, glistening or glaring, prismatic or penumbral. Oddly enough, though, light itself is not something we see; we see its reflections and refracti...
A review of the film Gravity prompts one Convivium contributor to cultivate a practice of gratitude this Thanksgiving.
I am three weeks into a new daily routine where I have been journaling the things for which I am grateful. Coinciding not coincidentally with Thanksgiving, my intent is to instill this new habit until the end of October with the hopes that it will stick. It...
Either way, I think that we get a good reading of the cultural climate if we look at the heroes gripping our collective attention. And with the final demise of Walter White, the heroic centre of AMC's Breaking Bad, there is something more than a little troubling about the type of hero for whom we find ourselves cheering.
If you haven't been caught up in the Breaking Bad buzz for the past few years, then you likely didn't tune in with the other 10.3 million people last Sunday night to watch the show's finale and, more lik...
Academic terms are not normally thrown around the set of NBC's Today Show. More commonly it is the source for fluff pieces, pseudo-news, and celebrity interviews. But recently with great earnestness host Matt Lauer asked Zachary Quinto, "What is it about our zeitgeist that so many of the blockbuster films are apocalyptic in nature?" Zachary was on the show to promote his film, Star Trek Into Darkness, where he plays the character of Spock. Zeitgeist is a German word meaning "spirit of the age or time," and is often attributed to the philosopher Georg Hegel. Sadly, Spock had no meaningful response to Lauer's query. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World: "An asteroid named 'Matilda' is on a collision course toward Earth and in three weeks the world will come to an absolute end. What would you do if your life and the world were doomed?"
Zeitgeist?
Academic terms are not normally thrown around the set of NBC's Today Show. More commonly it is the source for fluff pieces, pseudo-news, and celebrity interviews. But recently with great earnestness host Matt Lauer asked Zach...
At the beginning, you're just trying to sneak in an episode before dinner, and before you know it you're on a bender—clocking over ten hours in a span of only two days, full seasons watched from start to finish. I've been there, and it is a dark time. I shamefully admit that my Netflix and I are so well acquainted, it has filtered in an entire category of "things I might like" titled "Eighteenth Century Period Dramas with a Strong Female Lead."
Much like any addiction, it starts slowly and builds gradually. It gains momentum and eventually consumes you until you're trapped, completely beholden to the power of the screen, with no strength or desire to resist the "next episode playing in 10 seconds"...
The director, John Kahrs, shares how the idea of the film came from a time years ago while living in New York, commuting to and from work on the subway. He mused about the people he briefly crossed paths with, perhaps made eye contact with, and how "the connection was there for a second, and then it's gone forever and you never see that person again." .
It's during the 1940s on a train platform in New York City. A young man briefly meets a woman and the next second she is gone. Later in the day, as he's pushing paper around his desk, he glances out the window and sees the same woman through a window in the...
But I think I've fallen for the villain. Here, I will play the role of devil's advocate and offer a few words in praise of Javert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
According to our contemporary critical pantheon, I'm supposed to disdain Tom Hooper's film version of Les Misérables (though Stanley Fish has me feeling a little bett...