When David falls asleep on a remote beach, he awakens to find that Lori has oddly disappeared. And so have Larry and Suzette. Nobody can be raised on the shipboard radio—except a few scattered cries for help and general chaos—and it’s soon apparent that we are in a narrative tipped by the film’s tag line: “One man’s Revelation reveals he’s been Left Behind.” Note the caps. Also note my cynicism in this plot description. Note further that, in spite of my general cynicism about made-for-Christians cinema and about Rapture End Times theology in particular, I really enjoyed this apocalyptic thriller.

Setting sail back to Pahappahooey Island, Ali and the rest of her merry band immediately set aside the scrolls containing the “word of the Creator” and dig into the rest of the great treasure… golden yo-yos. Here endeth the spiritual teaching. I’m probably over-analyzing this simple story; but honestly, there are better choices out there if you want child-friendly programming with a spiritual message. Pahappahooey Island strikes me as more of a shallow effort to wring $15 a DVD out of a captive audience.

“That was a tough time for me,” said Williams, who plays an important, small role in The Road. “there was a lot of darkness around my personal life and even though things seem really bleak you have to remember we have a choice in life. You have choices to choose the right path or the wrong path… and keeping the fire alive is hope, staying positive-minded and looking for the silver lining, I guess, with the fire; and I identified with that at that time. I still do, but I was really identifying with it then because it was kind of a very dark time for me during that film.”

Director John Lee Hancock has established an oeuvre that is distinctly Southern… and yet warrants the use of such a hoity-toity word as “oeuvre.” His Hollywood coming-of-age was selling his screenplay for A Perfect World—which landed the talents of director Clint Eastwood and star Kevin Costner. He followed that up with the script for Eastwood’s version of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and then returned to the director’s chair with The Rookie, The Alamo, and this year’s The Blind Side. In Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago for a Warner Bros. press junket for the latter, I had the fortune to sit down for a one-on-one interview with Hancock to talk about images.

Director Richard Curtis’ Pirate Radio is one of those movies that will have you rushing from the theater to the record store to pick up the soundtrack. A fictional account of the pirate ships that broadcasted rock and roll across Britain in the 60s, the movie is packed full with great tunes from the era; and if the music alone wasn’t enough, the amount of fun the characters are having while listening to it will not-so-subliminally have you wanting to move to the oldies. This sense of fun pervades throughout the whole film.

No one likes destroying the world more than director Roland Emmerich, whose previous films include Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow. As much as the world was destroyed in those films, however, they don’t hold a candle to the amount of destruction Emmerich rolls out in his latest effort, 2012. I overheard someone refer to this movie as “disaster porn,” and I could not describe it any better myself.

Regardless of your political or spiritual bias, I think this story of forgiveness and hope after the horrors of the Rwandan genocide are a striking statement about humanity. It is a triumph over fear, an effort that often requires us to look outside ourselves for strength, both to our neighbors and to the divine as well. The case is well made that forgiveness is necessary for both victim and transgressor and is an essential part of the healing process. Especially in a case like this where not only are individual lives affected but also the potential future of an entire nation. It is an extreme case to be sure, and one that perhaps makes petty some of the grudges most of us carry with us in our own lives.

Certainly, students of film will be reminded of the spareness of Italian neorealism in Lake Tahoe. But the camera work and editing—which rarely (and I do mean rarely) resorts to tracking, dollying, or even simple narrative conventions like match cuts—are so spare that I imagine that Eimbcke is after something like “the aesthetic of ching-yu [which] allows the viewer the freedom to see, feel, and think without following a predetermined sequence or having to arrive at any logical conclusions.” It makes sense, almost, to think of Lake Tahoe as Central-American bonsai minimalist cinema. It’s also reasonable to just find it dull.

As much as I try to go into every movie with no preconceptions, if a movie’s Oscar chances have been built up prior to my seeing it, I often find myself going in with higher expectations than normal. The remedy for these higher expectations is for a movie to surprise me right from the get-go; to throw me off guard and balance out my expectations. It doesn’t have to be a big dramatic moment; it just needs to be something I wasn’t expecting. In the new drama An Education, it was simply the music that plays over the opening credits.

The film is a two-plus-hour sprawling, but nonetheless tightly-crafted, call to action in three parts: first, as proposed by the I-Heart Revolution creatively-punctuated manifesto, that “there is a like minded and like spirited generation of people from all round the world—who are worshipping God with all their heart and who want to make a difference and see injustice’s justified—a generation already part of the revolution”; second, that the world is one seriously messed up place; and third, that courageous and idealistic young people have almost always been at the core of the West’s social-justice movements. It is also an impassioned argument that godly love has also undergirded those same movements—and the craftsmanship here is, dare I say it, inspired.