Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. I am a shameless fan of Legendary’s Monsterverse.  Just ask any of my students, who, throughout the day, have no less than ten meticulously painted kaiju models glaring down at them from the bookshelves in my classroom. I have turned up to theaters for all five films of the series, watched both television shows, admittedly spent too much time reading the tie-in media of nebulous canonicity (i.e., comic books, novelizations, etc.), and even pre-registered for the upcoming mobile game—at this point, it’s a pr ..read more

It’s spring, which means many of us have finished rewatching Gilmore Girls over the past winter months. If you’re anything like me, you finish up another season having learned or felt something new. Perhaps a cultural reference that once went over your head made you laugh for the first time. Maybe you took a new side in an argument. Or maybe, thanks to social media, you’ve realized that you’re not the only one who’s not a fan of Rory Gilmore. Possibly, like me, you’ve started to better understand one of the characters, someone who used to frustrate you to no end. I thought I knew Lorelai Gilmo ..read more

Infinity is God’s business, not ours. Which is why Chris Hemsworth is the perfect subject for the National Geographic series Limitless. Our minds immediately associate Hemsworth with Thor, god of thunder and ruler of Asgard, who is relatively immortal and invincible compared to us regular, transitory humans. To watch Limitless, then, is to watch the thunder god become human and struggle against the limitations of his humanity, physical, mental, and emotional. Throughout the six-episode series, Hemsworth is on a quest to transcend his humanity by completing challenges, which are crafted and sho ..read more

Outside, it’s a weirdly warm February night on Chicago’s Fremont Street as lightning shatters the dark and wind howls through the skyscrapers. Inside, however, a ragtag jailhouse Shakespeare production is all that matters. A little blond woman in a green tank top hitches her pants up a bit higher and struts to the center of the stage. “Step right up if you wanna audition,” she barks. A young man with a ’fro and sweet brown eyes raises his hand, pleading, “I don’t want to be Puck again.” “You’re gonna be Puck, Karl!” another woman shouts. An older guy runs across the lineup to end the scene, an ..read more

The Way of Holiness and the Way of Hedonism Holiness and happiness, purity and pleasure, benevolence and blessedness, virtue and vivaciousness, faithfulness and fulfillment, character and contentment: what do these seemingly contradictory concepts have in common? What do these ideas—often pitted against each other as mutually exclusive—have to do with one another? Is this some kind of paradox?   There are some Wesleyan principles that I will take with me wherever I go, and one of these is the idea that holiness is the way to happiness. Believe it or not, the idea that the moral life is ..read more

There’s a moment in Bradley Cooper’s Maestro when Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein is hit with the weight of his choices. As he walks beside a park with an ex-lover, the distance between his former affections and the constraints of his current life tears him in two. He slows to a stop on the sidewalk until his friend realizes Bernstein’s pain and walks back to him, kissing him on the forehead.  Cooper’s biopic of the legendary American composer and conductor weaves around his musical triumphs and focuses instead on his relationships. It would seem that Bernstein is mourning this lost love—a l ..read more

[Ethan Hawke] belies the first impressions from his earliest roles and has mostly eclipsed the image Miller is frustrated with.  In 2023 I finally read Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, twenty years after it was originally published. It felt like his version of a Jack Kerouac stream-of-consciousness memoir, albeit framed through the lens of “nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality.” As such, it provides a snapshot of a very specific period in Christian culture, introducing characters like Mark Driscoll and Joshua Harris while highlighting Ravi Zacharias’s writings. We view each o ..read more

How is it that a catchy melody, solid groove, or infectious hook can make you want to dance to even the darkest and most nihilistic of thoughts? Prince’s “1999” is a certified banger that just so happens to be set on the edge of nuclear armageddon. “Everybody’s got a bomb / We could all die any day,” he sings. Nevertheless, he’s still going to dance his life away with the help of some funky guitar licks. Modern English’s “I Melt With You” is one of the best-known new wave hits from the ‘80s, so much so that it once appeared in a Burger King commercial. According to singer Robbie Grey, however ..read more

Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for the film Redeeming Love. As a young woman, growing up in an early 2000’s Christian home, I heard the praises of Francine Rivers’ 1997 novel, Redeeming Love. I was even given a copy of the book for my fifteenth birthday. The excitement surrounding its feature film adaptation was palpable in Christian women’s small groups. The book is entertaining and a wonderful romance story, to be sure. God didn’t instruct Hosea to marry an actual prostitute, but simply to marry an Israelite woman.  As a teen, growing up in the “I’m not single, I’m ..read more

Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for the film The Peasants. “Love comes and goes, but land stays.” It’s not exactly the kind of advice a girl expects from her mother on her wedding day. But this is late 19th-century Poland and we’re in a traditional agrarian village where farmland is coveted and marriages are brokered; where men and women till the soil and provide grist for the gossip mill in equal measure; where peasants drink vodka like it’s water, work themselves to the bone, and dance together till dawn; where the cycle of the seasons and the liturgy of the Catholic Church bin ..read more