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At first, director Darren Aronofsky felt like an odd choice to bring the biblical story Noah to the big screen. Aronofsky is known— in movies like Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan and yes, The Wrestler— for casting a camera on pain and the dark side of human existence. Noah is a story of goodness being preserved from the harsh world around it. But the story’s foundation is, at its core, a painfully harsh one and the depiction of that reality is Aronofsky proves that he was the perfect choice to bring this story to the screen. “In the beginning,...

Today marks the centenary of the birth of Sir Alec Guinness and to commemorate this, several of his finest films are being reissued on DVD and shown at the cinema. Such fuss would probably have caused the intensely private star acute embarrassment. After all, his good friend John Le Carré once noted how much Guinness "loathes the world's flattery and mistrusts its praise".

These are considered to be the Greatest Actresses in film based on talent, versatility, influence, characterization, charisma, and success in the movie business. (The actors are followed by a movie that showcases their talent.) How many of these great movies have you seen?

Part of this year’s Lenten discipline for many religious people has been to see two bad religious movies, “Noah” and “God’s Not Dead.” Both left me longing for the comparative moral simplicity and integrity of “The Wolf of Wall Street.” In “Noah,” the main character is a brooding, misanthropic vegan. One hopes that Russell Crowe, a fine actor, does not end up being typecast a la Charlton Heston. There just aren’t many parts for brooding, misanthropic vegans. The movie itself consists of tedium punctuated by anachronism, sanctimony and animated rock people. It contains just enough spiritual pretention to make you...

The Bible has long been a rich source of story ideas for filmmakers, and recently released movies like Son of God and Noah suggest that the biblical epic genre is far from exhausted. There are many reasons why filmmakers continue to make movies based on biblical stories. The Bible’s familiar stories feature larger-than-life characters, plenty of action, and time-tested storylines. However, from the film producer’s perspective, the primary reason why films based on biblical stories continue to be made is that these films are consistently able to make money. Darren Aronofsky’s interpretation of the biblical story of Noah opened last...

It may not quite approach the stature of building an ark to withstand an epochal flood, but the box office success of Noah this weekend — which opened with an estimated gross of $44 million — is still something of a remarkable feat. No other overtly Bible-themed feature film has opened anywhere close to that amount since 2004’s The Passion of the Christ, doubly remarkable considering that director Darren Aronofsky’s $125 million adaptation of the Old Testament story faced serious opposition from Christian groups that objected to perceived liberties the film takes with the biblical text. The film pulled in...

Can you believe the real name of one pop culture's most prominent icons of rugged American masculinity was... 'Marion'? The Duke himself (another name he went by, originally belonging to his boyhood pooch) would argue that the name 'John Wayne' is just as real as the one that appeared on his birth certificate. The Hollywood legend didn't take his aliases lightly; each represented a different persona in the late actor's life and career, a subject explored in Scott Eyman's exhaustively researched new biography, "John Wayne: The Life and Legend." "In Wayne's own mind, he was Duke Morrison," writes Eyman in...

Amazing screen performance: "God's Not Dead" Looks like God is doing his thing with a bit of help from film viewers, the Duck Commander, Willie Robertson, his great wife, Corie and the magnificent cast and production group led by Actor Kevin Sorbo, etc.!!! As Winston Churchill proclaimed to Herr Hitler after the Battle of Britain..."We are coming for you!!!" and then began sustained, night & day bombing of German Factories & Cities by the RAF & the AAF....we, the people, proclaim to anti-religion, Christian hater, POTUS, Obama, his Godless Academia lap dogs and his media Obamabots: "We, the God believers,...

Estimates for Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah are now anywhere from $41M to $44.6M based on a strong $15M Friday box office. I wondered while writing the box office last night if Southern CA audiences watching the film when the earthquake hit got a little seasick thinking how realistic the special effects were. Noah (PAR) was playing like a mainstream movie when it opened, but that bump indicates that it had some cross-over from the faith-based audiences which continue to keep God’s Not Dead in business. noahmovieAlthough based on the Biblical story, Noah doesn’t mention the name God once – how funny...

Kevin Sorbo, star of God’s Not Dead told a reporter at Faith, Media & Culture that by simply voting for the best person, that, in itself, is enough to get me blacklisted in Hollywood. Marius Forte, who co-authored with Sam Sorbo, radio talk show host and wife of Kevin Sorbo, The Answer: Proof of God in Heaven notes: We all know that Hollywood leans left and is uncomfortable with a Christian based message. Left-wing Hollywood seems impervious to the fact that God’s Not Dead opened on only 780 screens yet the movie, without benefiting from a mega-media roll-out that often...

The pre-release advertising promoting the movie Noah made a point of stating that while the director took artistic license in the production it was still faithful to the biblical story. Early theater previews were carefully edited to appeal to people of faith, but this is the least biblical “biblical film” of all time! However, to be charitable, the bare outline of the Flood story is present, but after that artistic license has taken the film so far afield of anything resembling the Bible that it is offensive to people of faith. To say that the biblical story was watered down...

Darren Aronofsky's controversial biblical epic Noah is winning over faith-based and mainstream moviegoers alike at the North American box office, ending weeks of speculation as to whether the filmmaker's darker take on the story of Noah and his Ark would be a turnoff for more devout moviegoers. The Paramount and New Regency movie easily topped the Friday chart with $15.2 million from 3,567 theaters for a projected $41 million to $43 million weekend, a strong start. Overseas, Noah is likewise prospering, grossing an early $28.3 million from only 21 markets (many of those opened Friday) and coming in ahead of...

When atheist director and co-writer Darren Aronofsky promised that his epic "Noah" would be "the least biblical film ever made," that was not hyperbole. "Noah" is a brilliant, compelling, beautifully-mounted, beautifully-acted piece of storytelling conceived for the sinister purpose of leading people to believe that Christianity and Judaism are something they are not. And I ask you, could anything make Satan happier than something that leads people to believe they are saved when they are not? I have absolutely no problem with a filmmaker taking a biblical story and adding or subtracting from it as a way to craft a...

Lorenzo Semple Jr., the creator of the campily classic Batman TV series who went on to craft such big-screen paranoid thrillers as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor -- though he would be replaced on both films -- has died. He turned 91 on Thursday... Semple’s résumé also includes the Steve McQueen-Dustin Hoffman escape tale Papillon (1973); Paul Newman’s Harper sequel The Drowning Pool (1975); Dino De Laurentiis’ King Kong (1976) starring Jessica Lange; and the rogue James Bond movie Never Say Never Again (1983)...

Let me just start by saying two words which you can accept as fair warning to avoid this stupidest movie in years: Rock People.Need more? Tragiclly, as Western Civilization continues to decay all around us, one thing remains unmuddled: everything is politics. And nowhere is that more true than in media. The same polarization that fired Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty and then got him rehired, and made Mel Gibson $600 million, and then lost him his Hollywood career, and made half the world want to canonize Roman Polanski with the other half wanting him castrated — these are the...

(Excerpt) Hollywood director Darren Aronofsky promised to create the least biblical, biblical movie ever made. And based on the early reviews of his film -- Mr. Aronofsky made good on his promise. He left the word "God" completely out of his movie and turned Noah into a crazed environmentalist with anger management issues who wants to slaughter his family. I also had some issues with the rock creatures portrayed in the film. Forefathers of "The Thing," perhaps?

I don’t get all the claims of radical environmentalism in Noah. I saw it last night. I did not draw out of it the environmentalism. In the movie, Noah took the position that all mankind had corrupted the earth with sin and God intended to wipe them all out. Noah presumed God would wipe him and his family out too once all the animals were saved. Sure, Noah was a vegetarian and the bad guys are meat eaters who do to the earth what Saruman did, but I don’t really see the whacked out radical environmentalism. It’s more thematic of...

Whenever Hollywood makes a movie from a well-loved story or saga — Batman, Tolkien, "50 Shades of Grey" — there's usually a period of ... well ... let's call it adjustment, along with a "spirited" give-and-take among fans over such things as casting, content and approach. Usually, though, the material's devotees don't believe the filmmakers will burn in hell if their ideas are ignored. (OK ... maybe the Dark Knight crowd does. We all know they can get a little intense.) But that's precisely the belief with "Noah," Darren Aronofsky's $130-million retelling of the Old Testament account of apocalyptic deluge...

by Ed Stetzer March 3, 2014 The following post is a guest post from Dr. Jerry Johnson. Jerry A. Johnson, Ph.D., is President & CEO of National Religious Broadcasters (NRB). He's a theologian who has taught on cinema and theology. This post is about the March 28, 2014 movie Noah. I interviewed Jerry about the film last week at the NRB meeting. In that interview, he mentioned asking Paramount to add a disclaimer and they just did (see the bottom of this post). Last Friday, Jerry shared five positives of Noah, and today he's sharing five negatives. Here are...

....Hollywood has finally discovered Mexican Americans and turned its attention to Cesar Chavez as if all Mexican Americans adore Chavez. A movie partly based on fact will open this week in 400 theaters. I predict it will fail at the box office. Why? Fact: only 5 percent of all American Hispanics are rural, thus 95 percent are city people who could care less about Mexican or Mexican American farm workers.