My Latest: Does Beauty Need to Be Enforced?

Sometimes I Pretend to Be a Film Critic

Last year, my biggest piece by ten million miles was a review that I wrote of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer-James Bond movie. It’s fun to occasionally get to play in the film critic space instead of the moral theology space, as I think film offers a lot of great opportunity for theological reflection. In the past, I’ve taught a class where half the texts were films, born of the conviction that seeing helps us to name what character should be like more than reading about character.

Anyway.

My latest, in Christianity Today, is on the new A24 film Opus, which I enjoyed a bit, for reasons probably adjacent to the story itself. In reading other reviews, it struck me as bonkers that none of the reviews seemed to pick up on this very obvious thesis, so I wrote on it: whether beauty has to barge its way in, or whether beauty is its own argument¹.

Check it out here:

1. My thesis is that 90% of professional film critics don’t know how to watch a film philosophically. Critics are deeply steeped in the world of film culture, but flat and super boring when it comes to what things mean. This is mirrored in films generally: when they try for meaning something, they usually have to resort to a great deal of unsubtlety. . This article on this phenomenon in film is a banger on this.