With the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday more or less officially ending the awards season, this is pretty much my last chance to blog on some best-films lists of 2011 worth highlighting.

Every year, in addition to putting together my own best-of list, I cast my votes for the two top 10 lists produced by ChristianityToday.com’s film critics, Most Redeeming and Critics’ Choice.

The ChristianityToday.com Critics’ Choice winners for 2011 are:

1. The Tree of Life
2. The Artist
3. Win Win
4. Hugo
5. Of Gods and Men
6. Moneyball
7. Drive
8. Midnight in Paris
9. Super 8
10. The Mill & the Cross

Since seven of those films are in my top 20, I’m pretty happy with this list. Of...READ MORE

On Sunday afternoon I was at the theater with my entire family to see the lovely new family film The Secret World of Arrietty, along with another family from our church. Each of our families has six kids, and my cousin was also with us, making 17 in all.

While I was standing on line to buy tickets, there was an announcement that a screening had sold out: Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, a nominal sequel to the action-adventure family flick Journey to the Center of the Earth, with a pec-popping Dwayne Johnson replacing Brendan Frasier. No one thinks Journey 2 is a masterpiece, probably not even The Rock, and yet it’s selling out theaters in its second weekend.

Two box-office windows...READ MORE

The Grey is a thoughtful, tough-minded little tale of survival and attrition that sets its sights a bit further than its firepower takes it.

Its assets include a sweeping Alaskan canvas as breathtaking as it is punishing, a consciousness of mortality and meaning rare in an action film, an uncompromising story-arc—and, crucially, the haggard face and haunted eyes of Liam Neeson, who balances indomitable toughness and brittle brokenness better than perhaps any other Hollywood star today. Neeson plays John Ottway, a burned-out wolver employed by an oil company to protect the drilling team from wolves in northern Alaska.

Its liabilities include some plodding dialogue and lapses in...READ MORE

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Ottway’s own concern is more practical: He collects the wallets of the victims, hoping to bring them to civilization for their families. In the absence of religious ritual, the wallets become almost a sort of sacred trust; with their pictures of loved ones and the memories they represent, they are all that is left of the victims’ identities.

The circumstances are dire. Perhaps too dire. The wolves are not only extraordinarily large and powerful and ferocious, but uncannily cunning as well. In one sequence the remaining humans go to astonishing lengths to move on from the wolves’ territory—but as soon as one of them missteps, the wolves are right there to pick him off.

For...READ MORE

Update #2

Well, it’s on. No more nonsense about “compromise” or “backing down.”

ABC News reports: Senate Democrats Say Obama ‘Reinforced’ His Stance on Contraception Mandate at Democratic Retreat. What’s more, they’re backing him up. 

President Obama “reinforced” his stance on the controversial contraception mandate while speaking at the Democrats’ annual retreat at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. today, Senate Democrats said…

Democrats said they will “fight strongly” to keep the mandate in place.

“It is our clear understanding from the administration that the president believes as we do, and the vast majority of the American women should have access to birth control,” Sen....READ MORE

As far as I can tell, the real story at the center of this week’s Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure Foundation / Planned Parenthood debacle is not that Komen cut off Planned Parenthood from existing funding. (They didn’t. Existing grants were to be honored for over a year.)

Nor is it that Komen excluded Planned Parenthood from any possibility of future funding. (Again, they didn’t. Rather, they suspended future funding pending the outcome of a congressional investigation of Planned Parenthood. Critics charged that the investigation was a fig leaf and Komen was actually responding to pressure from pro-life groups. It is worth noting that new Komen senior vice president Karen Handel is...READ MORE