TO THE WONDER is a romance from acclaimed director Terrence Malick (TREE OF LIFE, THE THIN RED LINE). Though it’s not a masterpiece, it’s likely his most personal movie yet.
Ben Affleck plays Neil, an American spending time in Europe who falls deeply in love with a French single mother, Marina. The movie follows them as they explore different French landscapes, only catching snippets of dialogue here and there. Marina decides to move herself and her daughter to Oklahoma to live with Neil. Oklahoma is a big change for Marina. Everything is flat and largely unpopulated, so what seemed like a good idea clearly wasn’t.
Marina and Neil begin to divide and fight. Interwoven in between the dramatic clashes between the couple are moments at church, where Father Quintana preaches on love. In the midst of the couple’s interactions, Father Quintana’s excerpts on love and his prayers to God are heard through voice over.
“You love, whether you like it or not. Emotions come and go like clouds. Love is not only a feeling, you show love. . . Love is a command”
Father Quintana himself struggles with his faith. He’s seen meandering around his empty house, clearly lonely, praying for the closeness to God he once had, but his loneliness doesn’t stop him from doing ministry. If he’s not preaching to his parish, he’s in the community helping those who are less fortunate.
Neil and Marina’s dispute escalate to the point where Marina decides to leave and go back to France. After Marina leaves, Neil reconnects with Jane, an old friend he grew up with in his youth. A new romantic relationship begins between them.
The relationships and emotions portrayed in TO THE WONDER are incredibly honest. Malick breaks away from traditional storytelling technique more than ever with this tale. Everything in the movie feels authentic and real. The beautiful visuals of both grand and small landscapes, mixed with the powerful orchestral music, help bring out the story’s emotion. Ben Affleck in particular gives one of his best performances as the reflective and deep thinking Neil, even though he says very little.
Father Quintana’s voiceover provides an abundant amount of wisdom that’s both Biblical and convicting. He quotes Scriptures like, “Husbands, love your wife as Christ loved the Church.” Sadly, Neil fails to exhibit any of the qualities that Father Quintana preaches so often, which is why Neil’s relationships end in a passionate mess.
What Malick fails to do is give the audience any sense of closure or fulfillment, either in the narrative or emotionally. Some positive lessons of love and faith can clearly be gleaned, but the story is overly ambiguous and ultimately not uplifting. TO THE WONDER also has brief graphic nudity, sensuality, and implied adultery, so the movie is excessive.

Julianne Moore plays, Linda, a high school English teacher who helps her former student perform his play, in THE ENGLISH TEACHER. THE ENGLISH TEACHER has a straightforward storyline and does have some funny elements, but overall it’s crude and has a mixed worldview.
Linda Sinclair is a high school English teacher in her middle 40s. Her highest passion and focus in life is to inspire her students to read and write. This has become such a focus that she’s never gotten married. Thinking that life should be as good as novels, Linda hasn’t found her “Prince Charming” yet.
One of Linda’s old students, Jason, comes back to town after living in New York and writing plays. Pressured by his overbearing father, Jason is about to give up writing for going to law school. When he lets Linda read his latest play, however, she believes it’s completely brilliant and should be performed by the theater students. However, she must convince the principal and flamboyant theater teacher, Carl, first. Carl falls in love with the play as well and thinks it would be so much more exciting then the stale plays they always perform.
Once they get the approval from the principal, Carl, Linda and Jason start the production. When Linda and Jason sleep together, however, everything gets out of hand and chaos ensues. Will they be able to perform the play?
THE ENGLISH TEACHER has a straightforward storyline. The acting is good, but overall the movie is pretty forgettable. Most of the comedy is crude, although the general theme is to sacrifice when you love something or someone. Thus, Linda sacrifices in order to get the play done. That said, a large part of the movie’s plot is Linda sleeping with Jason. THE ENGLISH TEACHER also has plenty of strong foul language, so extreme caution is advised.

PIETA is an artsy Korean thriller that doesn’t quite work, partly because it has some really disgusting, but thankfully brief, content and some pretentious arty attempts at symbolism that abuses Christian icons and imagery.
The movie, which takes its title from paintings of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus Christ, is about a brutal young debt collector who cripples poor workers who can’t pay his loan shark boss. A woman approaches him claiming to be the long-lost mother who abandoned him as a child. The young man brutalizes her because he doesn’t believe her, going so far as to rape her. However, when she expresses guilt and forgiveness, claiming that her abandonment turned him into such a mean, evil person, he starts to express kindness toward her and others. This leads, however, to a tragic, depressing ending that tries to use more Christian symbolism but ends up being rather pretentious and ultimately shallow and abhorrent.
PIETA is too artsy to be worthwhile aesthetically. That’s even more true when considering the movie’s entertainment value. Worse than this, however, is that the filmmakers try to take advantage of Christian symbolism in a tale with very strong sordid content. Thus, there’s an extremely disturbing rape scene, disturbing violence but little blood and gore, a suicide, a revenge theme, lots of strong foul language, and other lewd, disturbing content. PIETA also has an apparent anti-capitalist view, according to the director, who sees his movie as a strong criticism of a financial capitalism turning Korea into a “money oriented” society. Thus, the movie seems to have a strong Romantic worldview contending that it’s society that corrupts people. The director says he wants his movie to encourage the viewer to cry out, “God have mercy on us!” but that doesn’t come across in the movie at all.
Some may find PIETA interesting and profound, but, ultimately, it’s too cryptic, too sordid, too pretentious, and too much.

HATING BREITBART is a documentary that follows the late journalist, news executive and conservative-libertarian pundit Andrew Breitbart who died March 1, 2012. It has a strong moral, patriotic worldview supporting limited government and exposing the Democratic Party and the left wing’s smear machine against conservatives, especially Tea Party members. There is some foul language, however.
The documentary opens with Andrew complaining about the media, including Hollywood and national “journalists,” “dictating the terms of the narrative in this country.” He says he’s also sick of them mocking citizens in “Middle America.” The movie then cuts to people in the news media crudely mocking the grassroots Tea Party movement and calling them “racists.” Back to Breitbart complaining that these are the kind of smear tactics that leaders on the Left constantly level at conservatives and libertarians, including Christian evangelicals.
Using clips of Breitbart’s activities in the three years before he died, the documentary exposes these lies and slanders from the media and from the Left, including major Democrat Party leaders and supporters of President Barack Obama. It also shows how leftists and the media ignored Breitbart’s exposure of the corruption in a key campaign group supporting Democratic Party candidates like Obama and their policies. Finally, it shows how they distorted one of Breitbart’s columns about apparent racism in the anti-discrimination group, the NAACP. The NAACP used to be a dedicated civil rights group, but it has become a corrupt institution that excuses the failures of liberal policies in helping African Americans succeed while always condemning any successful black person who takes a conservative stance on issues, such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Interviews with supporters and critics of Breitbart help complete the picture of this super-smart, compassionate “rabble rouser.”
“You declared war on us,” Breatibart tells the Left and the mainstream media at one point. “You declared war on me. . . . It’s that simple.” Later, he adds, “What the Left has stood with political correctness is to try to get those with whom they disagree to shut up. . . . We have to confront these people. . . . We have an obligation to fight back.”
Andrew Breitbart was a vanguard of the “New Media.” For instance, he became editor for journalist Matt Drudge’s website “The Drudge Report” in the 1990s and helped Arianna Huffington (when she was a Republican) with creating “The Huffington Post.” He then went on to create his own cutting-edge websites, starting with Breitbart TV followed by Big Hollywood, Big Government and Big Journalism. Over the years, several of MOVIEGUIDE®’s editors, including Publisher Ted Baehr, met and talked with Andrew at multiple functions. Andrew was a very personable and passionate man with, unlike most of today’s leftist journalists running the national “news” media, a heart for real news. Though he admitted he wasn’t a “religious conservative” and sympathized with some libertarian notions, he expresses sympathy in the documentary with the positions of “social conservatives.” For example, Andrew was a critic of Planned Parenthood, which doesn’t report some rapists or pedophiles to the police and promotes the killing of babies in the ninth month of pregnancy and even beyond. Just before he died, he told a mutual friend that he had found faith in Jesus Christ and wanted to be baptized in every state in the USA.
Ironically, the New York Times just recently vindicated one story Breitbart was pursuing, about massive fraud in the Obama administration’s Dept. of Agriculture (see http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/new-york-times-andrew-breitbart-90681.html). Also, recent reports have confirmed that President Obama and his people in the Internal Revenue Service targeted Tea Party groups, Christian evangelicals, and other conservatives who oppose their policies. Once again, an investigation confirms conservative suspicions about big government and corrupt, fraudulent liberal policies and principles!
HATING BREITBART is an inspiring rallying cry for conservatives and libertarians, including Christian evangelicals, to continue the passionate fight that animated Andrew Breitbart. It has a strong moral, patriotic worldview that extols truth, justice, limited government, liberty, and fiscal responsibility. It exposes the lies and slanders of the Left, which are the primary methods by which Democrat Party flunkies and other leftists stop citizens and voters from becoming conservatives. However, there is some foul language, plus some bleeped “f” words. In addition, there’s talk about the two journalists who posed as a pimp and his prostitute in order to expose the corruption in one of the Democratic Party and the Left’s activist groups. For these and other reasons, MOVIEGUIDE® advises extreme caution for HATING BREITBART, especially for children.