A woman, Leslie Strobel, converts to Christianity in the new Pure Flix film The Case for Christ (2017) and, wisely, it is depicted with subtlety.  Her husband Lee also converts (at the end of the film), but by then subtlety is gone.  The unbelievers in the audience squirm.  The Case for Christ is ALMOST squirm-proof, however, as it proffers some interesting material about a busy atheist and his uncommon marriage.

Lee and Leslie are real-life persons, Lee being a former Chicago journalist.  Selfish and loutish, he cannot accept Leslie as a Christian and he tries to discredit the faith through interviewing skeptics and Bible experts about the Resurrection.  The info in the interviews supporting the Resurrection we have long been familiar with, but Lee Strobel in the late 1970s was not familiar with it.  To be sure, it isn’t quite as intellectually strong as screenwriter Brian Bird and director Jon Gunn think it is, but it is strong.  All the same, Kevin McLenithan is right that “Brian Bird’s great contribution [to the film] is to make Strobel’s marriage, rather than his investigation, the centerpiece of the story.”  It is this that is interesting.  Leslie tells a frustrated Lee that now that she has found Jesus Christ, she loves her husband even more than she did previously, and it rings true.  The very thing, this, that no atheist or agnostic can possibly, truly understand.

As Lee and Leslie, Mike Vogel and Erika Christensen are splendidly persuasive, and effective also are Alfie Davis and Robert Forster.  The movie has a knowing, talented cinematographer in Brian Shanley.

Onward, Pure Flix, and next time, more subtlety!

There is stale armed rebellion stuff (the rebellion is justified) in the recent Star Wars pic, Rogue One (2016), but the film is typically pleasantly energetic and photographically flawless, with smart lighting, etc.

To my mind, its jabba-the-hutt creepies do not make Rogue One rich enough.  Felicity Jones, however, provides femininity and okay acting as Jyn Erso, a survivor-warrior; and there’s an enjoyable robot, or droid.

Directed by Gareth Edwards.

The fourth season of The Americans on DVD—I’m watching it.

Things start going wrong for Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth (Keri Russell), the two Soviet spies with American accents in D.C., just when the Soviet Union itself is shown to be limping along (to the end of the road?).  The FBI discovers that Martha (Alison Wright), one of its paper-filin’ secretaries, married, without knowing it, a KGB officer!  That would be Phillip.  Worse, Martha becomes a traitor.  Martha’s boss (Richard Thomas) never had a clue.  Our enemies, however dangerous, are not as efficient as we continually think.

Despite the straining of our credulity, the first seven episodes of Season 4 are fun and compelling.  Viewers of Season 5, I’m right behind you.

Cover of Under the Sand

On Under the Sand (2000):

Like Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Maborosi, this French film by Francois Ozon centers on the mysteriousness of an individual death, but it is far less effective than that masterly Japanese picture.  For one thing, it seems to also center on a person’s irrational, even insane, response to an individual death, a loved one’s death, and this possibility merely leaves the film obscure.  More importantly, it is bland and dull—like so many other French films nowadays, distinctly un-entertaining.  Art such as that in Under the Sand shouldn’t be as dry as sand.

The presence of Charlotte Rampling doesn’t help much.  I like her graceful, poignant performance as well as her fetching smile and lovely hair, but she deserves a better movie.  Existential mystery is poorly served by this weakling of a film.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover of Scotland, PA

In Scotland, PA (2001), director-screenwriter Billy Morrisette parodies, and transfers to 1975, Macbeth.  By adapting a violent classic for a series of well-photographed scenes, Morrisette proves sort of a comic Claude Chabrol, out for fun.  His film is hilarious, and the cinematography by Wally Pfister is brightly handsome when it isn’t tellingly dim.

Not only is Scotland, PA—well acted by James Le Gros, Maura Tierney, and a few others—not a tragedy, it cannot even be called a tragicomedy.  Just a dark farce, with Morrisette completely indifferent to Shakespeare’s themes.  And it’s a slapdash dark farce at that.  Have a good time.