Artist of the Month: January 2012
Steven Greydanus
Film reviewer Steven Greydanus is an omnivore, but a discriminating one. In his prolific reviews at his blog, DecentFilms.com, and at the National Catholic Register, he covers nearly every film that comes to theaters, from The Tree of Life to Mission Impossible to The Smurfs—with a particular but not exclusive focus on religious resonances. (He also does a number of thirty-second video reviews that are both playful and informative—and concise!) An unabashedly orthodox Catholic who is not shy about making moral judgments, he can be bracingly caustic about the vagaries and vanities of mainstream Hollywood, but he is willing to recognize profound and artful filmmaking wherever it may occur, from The Muppets to Moneyball.
His prose is energetic and crisp (“Putting Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford in Stetsons is clearly an excellent idea”), but it can also probe deeply, as in this quote from a review of The Way: “The catch-phrase ‘spiritual but not religious’ is among the most glib and insipid pieties of our times. The Way, with its centuries of tradition, its ritual gestures and formalities, its institutions and symbols, its physically demanding regimen, and its cultural, Christian and Catholic particularity, is a gratifying reminder of how religion grounds and enriches us in ways that ‘spirituality’ can’t.” A father of six, Greydanus gives special attention to films for children and families, in reviews that go deeper than warnings about sex, language, and violence, instead exploring what films teach children about culture, consequences, redemption, and the natural world.
Read an excerpt from his essay in Image issue 70 on family films about "broken homes"--where houses themselves are transformed by the dramas that happen inside.
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