Peripatetic Pastor

Category: Movie Reviews

  • HOLDING TO OUR HUMANITY IN INHUMAN TIME

    “Wake Up Dead Man,” a movie by Rian Johnson and “It Was Only an Accident,” a movie by Jafar Panahi We are just back from the Boston area, where we walked where some of my ancestors walked, explored places we had long heard about but never visited, had thanksgiving dinner with friends, and attended the…

  • LOOKING FOR LOVE

    A Review of “Materialists” by Celine Song The title of Celine Song’s new movie is apt. She portrays a Manhattan culture of unapologetic materialism. What matters is money, youth, good looks, height, power, and, well, money. Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a professional matchmaker. She works for a company with the cringy name Adore. She’s already…

  • Lynden: the Movie

    Lynden (2024). Documentary directed by Chris Baron and Bryan Tucker. Limited release in theaters in the Pacific Northwest. I grew up in Lynden, Washington. The town was much smaller then than now. The sign at the city limits gave the population as 2500. Now it’s something over 15,000, but it feels still like a small town.  The…

  • MAESTRO: How Bradley Cooper Gets Bernstein Wrong

    Movie Notes September 25, 2021. We were emerging from the COVID lockdowns. The Bellingham Symphony (BSO), a fine regional ensemble under the direction of Yaniv Attar, had been producing online concerts, but however fetchingly they are done online concerts are not the same as a live performance. Now, for the first time since the pandemic…

  • BARBIE AND THE GARDEN OF EDEN: WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN

    The best biblical movie of the year is Barbie. An additional nod in the way of biblical movies should go to Oppenheimer. Together these summer blockbusters—they are jointly saving Hollywood—mine biblical themes to explore the human condition. They are secular sermons preaching to a secular audience truths the church too often neglects or buries under…

  • NO BEARS (2022)

    Directed by Jafar Panahi (Iran) In 2010, Jafar Panahi was arrested in Iran on charges of disseminating antigovernment propaganda. Part  of the Iranian New Wave and already well-known in the West, Panahi was convicted, put under house arrest, and forbidden to make movies or to leave the country for twenty years. In the thirteen years…