This is a film review of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery(2025), directed by Rian Johnson.
This is a book review of Joel Mayward, Theology and the Films of Christopher Nolan: Cinematic Transcendence (Bloomsbury Academic/Fortress Academic, 2025).
This is a film review of The Story of Documentary Film: Episode 1, “The Beginning" (2026), directed by Mark Cousins.
This is a film review of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (2026), directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell.
This is a film review of Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story (2026), directed by Judd Apatow and Neil Berkeley.
This is a book review of Megan Hunt, Southern by the Grace of God: Religion, Race, and Civil Rights in Hollywood’s American South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2024).
This article offers a Kierkegaardian reading of The Shawshank Redemption (1994), arguing that the film functions not as a miracle narrative but as a cinematic enactment of existential theology. While existing scholarship frequently interprets Shawshank through biblical typology or Foucauldian notions of incarceration, few consider how the film dramatizes Kierkegaard’s categories of anxiety, despair, and the leap of faith. Shawshank presents prison as more than a space of punishment—it becomes a refuge from the “dizziness of freedom,” a structured escape from the terrifying burden of possibility. Brooks’s suicide tragically embodies what Kierkegaard calls the “despair of weakness,” the inability to exist as a self outside institutional certainty. Andy Dufresne, by contrast, cultivates an inward life that survives confinement, ultimately performing a postsecular form of faith grounded in human action rather than divine intervention. His escape transforms utopia from non-place into lived space, enacting hope against hopelessness. By reading the film through Kierkegaard, supplemented by Soja’s Thirdspace and Habermas’ postsecular theory, this article reframes Shawshank as a story of salvation without miracle, redemption without metaphysics, and hope made real through inward commitment and outward action.
This is a film review of Jane Elliott Against the World (2026), directed by Judd Ehrlich.
This is a book review of Heba Arafa Abdelfattah, Filming Modernity and Islam in Colonial Egypt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023).
This is a film review of The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (2025), directed by Noah Segan.
This is a film review of Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild] (2026), directed by Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil.
