Jason Byassee

This summer, the most common theme being played out at the movies is this: No matter who you are, you are the same as everyone else.

After centuries of Westerners going to Africa to teach, documentary filmmaker James Ault goes to learn.

The lead character of Wallander is a cop relentlessly pursuing justice. He knows he should leave work at the office, but he can't.

The Borgias series has a human, believable Pope Alexander VI. But it misses opportunities to make more of holiness as well as of sin.

Llewyn Davis lives a decidedly nonromantic existence as a starving artist. He’s a good musician, but there are thousands like him, and they can’t all succeed.

Though action-packed, Peter Jackson's Hobbit films have less of what made his Lord of the Rings movies work: character development, humor, interior drama.

Twelve Years a Slave pulls no punches. As a white southerner, I found myself objecting that it couldn't have been as bad as this all the time. But these horrors happened, and we have yet to face them squarely.

While Gravity doesn't pass the Bechdel test, it does feature a female lead in a story that isn't about romance or sex. But is it her story or Everyman's?

In case you haven't noticed, Duck Dynasty is ruling the world. And the popular reality show has a prayer in every episode.

The teachers in Animate are excellent. But I'm not sure that the cumulative impact of the video series is excellent.

The Newsroom is a great show that presents a noble sentiment. But it occasionally rings false.

Lloyd Rediger's "clergy killer" premise is, in some senses, indisputable. Yet put so baldly, the kvetch seems odd.

Eric Metaxas’s take on the absence of faith in the film 42 is curious. He is right that the film downplays the role of faith in  Branch Rickey’s and Jackie Robinson’s lives. But faith is not absent, “a mysterious hole at the center of this otherwise worthy film.”

Star Trek has long been insistently nonreligious. But in the end it has not replaced religion, just repurposed it.

The hardest review to write is the B- review. And the History Channel’s five-part miniseries The Bible is neither excellent nor miserable.

The show Homeland puts viewers in a moral vice and squeezes.

I don't like family sitcoms, so I long avoided Modern Family. But the show catches the way family can be both loathsome and life-giving.

Why is the video of Mumford & Sons’ single “I Will Wait” so powerful? When I feel lousy, I dial the thing up on YouTube. Everyone I’ve sent it to has a similar response. And this isn’t even the best song on Babel. Whence its power? Why was it one of YouTube’s most watched videos of 2012?