Category: Movies
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Music critic Jens F. Laurson plays and discusses the music of Othmar Schoeck
Othmar Schoeck was an important Swiss composer during the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast to the more dissonant style pursued by contemporaries, Schoeck is known for his essentially tonal music and his attention to melodic values, rather than dissonant effects. As to his many works, Schoeck made major contributions to lieder with…
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Aretha Franklin, witness to the Gospel
Deal W. Hudson May 16, 2019 Amazing Grace is one of the greatest concert movies of all time In January 1972, Aretha Franklin travelled to Los Angeles to join her good friend Pastor James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir to record a gospel album. That album, entitled Amazing Grace, went on to become the…
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You need to watch this German masterpiece
Deal W. Hudson February 28, 2019 Never Look Away tells kind of the story that invites superlatives and deserves them. Based upon the life of painter Gerhard Richter, it tells the story of an artist who lives through the Nazi horror and the communist stranglehold, then escapes to West Berlin where, after much trial and error,…
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Films that take you into the wilderness with Jesus
Deal W. Hudson March 14, 2019 It’s hard to understand why any director making a film about Jesus would ignore the face-off with Lucifer. Cecil B DeMille has his mind elsewhere in his 1927 King of Kings. Himself succumbing to carnal temptation, DeMille opens his film with a barely clad Mary Magdalene, now a prostitute…
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Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’ is badly misunderstood
Deal W. Hudson February 7, 2019 Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, recently condemned the New York Times for using a picture of “a nun in habit standing behind a jail-like façade” to accompany a review of Jacques Rivette’s 1966 film La Religieuse (“The Nun”). Based on a novel by Diderot, it depicts the…
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The extraordinary power of ‘transcendental’ films
Deal W. Hudson January 24, 2019 Deal Hudson on the shattering effect of movies that defy our expectations In 1971, Paul Schrader, a film student at UCLA, published a book called Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Although he was only 24 years old, his theory of “transcendental style” – expressed in formal academic language…
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Deal W. Hudson interviews Terry Teachout on Church and Culture Today, Part 1 and Part 2
Terry Teachout is now the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, the critic-at-large of Commentary, and the author of “Sightings,” a column about the arts in America that appears biweekly in the Friday Wall Street Journal, and author of books about George Balanchine, H.L, Mencken, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong. In these two episodes…
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New Production of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ Magnificent
Deal W. Hudson October 30, 2017 From its first performance in 1951, “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” an opera by Ralph Vaughan Williams has suffered from a checkered history on stage. Its Covent Garden premiere was criticized for its lack of “theatricality,” and the attempt at a revival the following year was a failure. A subsequent and…
Deal W. Hudson 