There Will Be Blood opens in 1897, 15 years earlier than its literary source, Upton Sinclair’s Oil! The shift is significant. In 1890 the Census Bureau declared that the American frontier had been closed and the expansion of the United States from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific had been com
Richard A. Blake
Richard A. Blake, S.J., served as managing editor and executive editor of America and director of the Catholic Book Club, as well as America's regular film reviewer for many decades. He is the author of Afterimage: The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers, among other books.
Posted inFilm
What Might Have Been: A flawed adaptation of Ian McEwan’s ‘Atonement’
Novelists are liars. So are filmmakers. In their search for the truth artists find mundane reality quite unsuited to their purposes. The only solution lies in creating an alternative universe, where events and personalities lead to desired conclusions. In “Burnt Norton” T. S. Eliot observed, “
Posted inFilm
Byzantium,Texas: ‘No Country for Old Men’
As a title, No Country for Old Men boasts a noble ancestry. It traces its roots through the novel by Cormac McCarthy to the opening line of William Butler Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” In the poem Yeats yearns to leave the ephemeral world of “whatever is begotten, born
Posted inFilm
A Man for Our Season: Michael Clayton, one man’s ethical wasteland
George Clooney as Thomas More? A review of ‘Michael Clayton’
Posted inFilm
Ingmar Bergman, Theologian?
At age 89, on July 30, 2007, Ingmar Bergman left us. Tragically, he won’t be widely mourned by today’s movie audiences. His unblinking, introspective examination of the human condition places heavy demands on his viewers. His last film, “Saraband” (2002), was greeted respectf
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
A Time to Remember
Watching old movies provokes a strange set of conflicted emotions All those beautiful people up there on the screen are frozen in time locked in eternal youth and bringing joy to yet another generation of viewers Sadly however time slips by as relentlessly as the strip of film through the proje
Posted inFilm
Wondrous Stillness: Into Great Silence
French theorists used to employ the term “pure cinema” to describe film as an entirely new art form of moving images. It struck directly at the senses and created its own experience, without reliance on older forms like literature, painting, music or photography. The theory provided the
Posted inFilm
A Complicated Truth: Beyond the Gates
One need not be one of those bloated bloviators of talk radio to rush to the judgment that political correctness and ethnic sensitivity can be carried to comic, even tragic, extremes at times. Philip Roth, an author of solid liberal credentials, explored the dark side of planet P.C. in his splendid
Posted inFilm
Trust: Breach
Trust receives no flag-draped coffin, no posthumous medals and stirring eulogies, but it has ever been a tragic casualty of war, and we have been in a state of war for nearly a century now. Words lose their meaning, and covenants prove hollow. What political leader can we believe? Who from the busin
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Fantasies Abounding
Viktor Frankenstein created the Monster Walt Disney created Walt Disney but the outcome was pretty much the same The creation takes control of the creator Even more chilling in Neal Gabler rsquo s unspoken subtext is the suggestion that the Disney empire provides a cautionary tale for America M