Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'movies'

Going My Way: An Enduring True Fairy Tale

Every Christmas, I try to write about Christmas movies, especially about old Hollywood, because the best directors at the time considered it worthwhile to make movies that would chastise and cheer up the nation, indeed remind people of the spirit of Christmas and thus try to fit Christianity into the new entertainment that dominated the American imagination. Continue Reading...

Disney and Human Flourishing

Sometime in the last decade, the collegiate class were led by their dedicated sophists to start talking about “the narrative,” which hadn’t concerned them before. Soon they also started complaining about propaganda, “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.” Continue Reading...

The two lives of Steve McQueen

Someone once said of Steve McQueen (1930–80) that his range as an actor was deep but not very broad. All right, I admit it—I said it in my 2001 biography of the all-American star who still looms over Hollywood like a sort of male equivalent of the Statue of Liberty, more than 40 years after his untimely death. Continue Reading...

Hollywood’s craven surrender to the Chinese Communist government

Who’s in charge in Hollywood? Surely studio bosses, well-compensated executives, A-list actors, and celebrated writers and directors set the agenda in the American entertainment industry, don’t they? Not so fast, says Wall Street Jour­­nal reporter Erich Schwartzel in a rigorously researched, admirably hard-hitting new book that looks at the pernicious influence of China on Hollywood. Continue Reading...

Movies That Define America

Don’t you love lists? Intercollegiate Press does too, and they’ve put together “12 Movies That Defined America.” Feel free to argue, debate, add on, cross off as you wish. Here are just a couple of Intercollegiate Press’ choices: The Birth of a Nation – 1915, silent. Continue Reading...