On Media

The Musée de l'Homme has a new look. It asks timeless questions.

Preacher has enough violence to satisfy a small planet of adolescent boys. It also has church budget meetings.

Eye in the Sky suggests a Godlike view of drone warfare. But what if we consider a different theological angle?

If we are looking for the moment that precipitated our fall into the media blitz that is our common life, we might consider the O. J. trial.

When I walk and talk with a friend, we share an intimate experience. Listening to a podcast is similar.

Lemonade is a spectacular piece of visual theology. It offers hope for healing—not a generic healing, but the healing of black, female bodies.

Like Dmitri Karamazov, Robert Mapplethorpe knows that the beautiful is a battleground—and he's happy to play on the devil's side.

In The Lady in the Van, viewers see playwright Alan Bennett befriend a woman experiencing homelessness—and treat her as a human.

In an era of partisan politics, it's difficult to tell the truth. The complaints about Confirmation reveal a lack of progress.

Few Americans may believe in witches—or in a Puritan God. Yet The Witch explores human impulses that are still with us.

That Dragon, Cancer is a unique video game: it offers us the experience of our powerlessness.

A new film and a hit podcast both feature women telling war stories—a role that’s usually reserved for male protagonists and male narrators.

In Concussion, Dr. Bennet Omalu is a Nigerian immigrant and an outsider. This status is complicated by competing ideas of what America is.

This year, the Oscars honored three films that are poignant meditations on a person's agency in falling and staying in love.

Nearly 15 years ago, the Boston Globe broke the story of the priest-pedophilia and bishop-cover-up crimes. The film Spotlight, which chronicles the investigative reporting behind the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage, is now up for a Best Picture Academy Award. While this new film shines a light on what happened then, watching it now reveals how the Catholic landscape has changed (and not changed) since the story broke in 2002. While the reporters depicted in Spotlight initially pursue the stories of particular priest-pedophiles, the editors see the bigger picture: the bureaucratic system, the hierarchy, and the mindset that allowed these priests to be moved from parish to parish without legal intervention.

In Jessica Jones, the superhero villain's control over people is chilling because we recognize it. It plays out in ordinary abusive relationships.

One might expect Spotlight to be fascinating because of the victims' stories. But it's the focus on clerical and legal institutions that grabs the viewer.

Rectify is unlike any series I've watched. Its slow burn reveals the viewer as well as the characters in the story.

"What was the point of that movie?" my son asked, without hostility. He knew that what he'd seen was about more than what he'd seen.

Gortimer Gibbon's Life on Normal Street uses a combination of magic and realism that depicts real life far better than any other family television show I've seen.