The title of Paolo Sorrentino's latest doesn’t refer to a fixed stage in life but to the mysterious inner spark—as much spiritual as biological—that keeps us going.
He flies only to scurry along another / reach of surf where he / pricks the cold for / prey smaller / than grains of prose. The freedom / to guess right is his...
Mighty planet Earth / orbits to order, its greenest blues / attractive, to make our / life-giving aerial envelope / lawful, obedient, singing. / It turns...
All six movies I watched between Christmas and New Year’s Day were about looking back: to historical eras; to the protagonists’ pasts; or, for us, to our own pasts.
Pope Francis kicked off the Jubilee Year of Mercy with the opening of the Holy Door at St. Peter’s. I started my observance with a brilliant black comedy from HBO.
There’s only song / because there are mountains, / because mountains distort / what we say, / and that’s / how song takes shape— / with words twisted / by hills...
Readers weight in on the debate started by Albert B. Hakim on universal salvation and damnation for the unjust, and fact-check our review of 'Spotlight.'
"Room" is a work of skill, with an interesting shift that says as much about the differences between literature and cinema as it does about the talents involved.
In a small way, the foreign residents / Are rounded up—the Spartans sit and comb / Their hair, watched by the Persians from their tents— / Rationing starts...
'Spotlight' portrays the Globe’s reporters as heroes, but theirs is a workaday heroism without flourishes or frills. 'Truth,' by contrast, is soaked in personality.
If today the world and the self are devalued, as Walker Percy has suggested, art—particularly the novel— can awaken the reader to their recovery from '4 p.m. blues.'
“the quality of mercy” / is a fierce and terrible beauty.../ it hungers in its waiting / then consumes our darkest brokenness / even as it invites us to its table...
Life teaches us that true gratitude is invoked spontaneously, by utterance, not by canned speech. Perhaps this is why I can’t easily summon memories of Thanksgiving.
By focusing on cultural and institutional microcosms, a documentary paints a picture of an entire society whose various activities are all embedded with chaplains.
I will wear sweatshirts with bright appliqués / Of owls, and work for Head Start. Saturdays //
Will be the food bank; Sundays, church at ten. / Evenings I'll...
Arch after arch set in the brick, / Rosettes along them, pebble-thick; // Draped, helmed, armed figures, scribes with scrolls, / And eagles in their leafy holes:...
Paint. Paint the soft lines / of damp cheeks across a canvas. / Paint the deep eyes, the little / hand and the orb. / Splash some color along the curve / of her...
To hell with postmodern irony. Here are two earnest movies with straight-arrow heroes: "The Martian," with Matt Damon, and "Bridge of Spies," with Tom Hanks.
As I said, I’m a lawyer. Technically speaking, / is a head blown to pieces by a smart bomb a beheading? // Infinitely compressible, yet expandable time...
Stone's characters were human, and humans screw up; there wasn’t much to do about that except to situate the culprits in clarifying narratives of moral scrutiny.
What’s fairly new about 'Black Mass' is that this gangster story focuses more on the moral seduction and destruction of a lawman than on the downfall of a hood.
The series presents a view of medieval Catholicism as the realm of cranks and fanatics, while Thomas Cromwell is shown as distinctly rational and reasonable.
Set in bombed-out Berlin of 1945, Petzold's 'Phoenix' questions who was guilty, and of what, in the daily workings of the Holocaust—and will there be a reckoning?
The result of her years-long quest to find fellow victims of smear campaigns, Dreger's 'Galileo's Middle Finger' reveals a problem larger than political correctness.
Centered around the missing bomber pilot from 'Life After Life,' Atkinson's 'A God in Ruins' examines the interplay of real life and the life of the imagination.
Spanning almost James Agee's entire lifetime, these letters between author and his priest cover alcohol, God, poetry, childhood, and a “mouthful of sweet potato.”
In 'The End of the Tour,' James Ponsoldt addresses the life—and death—of David Foster Wallace, served as the Platonic ideal for a generation of younger writers.
Set on present day Staten Island Eddie Joyce's 'Small Mercies' traces the effect of 9/11 on the families of people living in “the servants’ quarters of New York."
At the Fifth Station of the Cross / I am asked to “accept in particular / the death that is destined for me” / Which I must keep myself from guessing...
One of Merton’s gifts as a writer was the ability to insinuate himself into the lives of those he'd never met and remain a personal presence decades after his death.
