Meek's Cutoff is the latest ponderous, gorgeously shot film from the minimalist indie director Kelly Reichardt, whose two previous films—2006's Old Joy and 2008's Wendy & Lucy—were striking examples of her delicately academic approach to cinema and interest in exploring journeying characters in moments of despair (existential, personal, psychological).

Every April I read The Great Gatsby. The tradition started the April of my junior year at Wheaton College, when I took my copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece (the most perfect American novel, IMHO) to Adams Park, laid down on the newly warm grass and read through the whole book in one sunny afternoon. It was bliss.

I think it's important to have restraint. If there's one thing I've been learning—and want to keep learning—it is the importance of being slow to speak, but quick to listen. I want to be a better listener, a better perceiver, a better interpreter of the world and its beauties. To take in more than I churn out... and then to churn out only after a thoughtful period of processing and active listening... that's where I want to be. As a blogger, as a friend, as a follower of Christ.

Lost in the shuffle of the furious Bell debates is the reality that the most important object of our focus and energy should be the person of Christ: Who he is, what he did on the cross, and what he continues to do in and for the world.

as a lover of the Church and a believer in the biblical call to following Christ in community, my question is: How do we make the case for attending church? Rather than throw up our hands and declare the end of the local church, what can we do to re-articulate the kingdom dream of Christ, which involves us not just as individuals but as the church body?

The following are three films nominated for Oscars this year that have zero chance of winning. But I’d love to be proven wrong! They are amazing films and far better than many others they’re nominated alongside.

If the abiding truth of reality is that everyone in the world (including me) is exactly as they ought to be—every last broken, frail, misguided, treacherous one of us—then the world is a far darker place, and virtuous existence a far more futile endeavor, than any of us previously imagined.

I'm going to be writing more about the show this summer as it finishes its run on NBC, but for now I'll just say this: I'm so thankful for Friday Night Lights--for so many reasons. It was a rare show that took beauty, truth and goodness seriously, and which favored earnestness and simplicity in a medium that increasingly seems to prefer gimmicky, trite, cynical and overblown. I appreciated Lights because of how complicated it was, how hard it was to classify. I appreciated it because it featured the best portrait of a marriage I've ever seen on television.

The great hope of the networked, power-to-the-collective, wikipedia web world is that somehow the masses will be bound together in common causes more quickly and more efficiently than ever. Somehow we will all become more selfless and more willing to work together across dividing lines now that we're all so interconnected. But this great web we exist within has hardly made humanity more unified. On the contrary, it seems like we're more fragmented than ever--with more and more self-interested cliques and groups and niche blogs vying for the energies of smaller and smaller bands of people.

Until recent weeks, David Fincher's The Social Network won pretty much every major award of the season. It was named best picture by the National Board of Review, the Critics Choice Awards, the Golden Globes, and pretty much every major film critics circle. Then, all of a sudden, The King's Speech came on strong at the guild awards, winning top honors at the Producer's Guild, Director's Guild, and Screen Actors Guild Awards. The momentum shifted, and now Tom Hooper's royal costume drama seems poised for a rout of The Social Network at the Oscars.Which is really unfortunate.

As Christians, if we truly believe that each human is a precious being—that, as C.S. Lewis put it, “there is no mere mortal… Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses”—then shouldn’t we be seeking to truly know others rather than to simply “keep tabs on” them through short updates, photo albums, and wall posts?

The 2011 Oscar nominations were announced this morning, and as is typically the case, there are some hits and some misses. By and large I think the Academy got it pretty right, with a few good surprises (Jacki Weaver for Animal Kingdom) and some bad (no Andrew Garfield supporting actor nom?). If I were to have a say in the nominations, they would have gone something like this.

We live in a time when "authenticity" is equated with those things or those people who are forthright in their brokenness and messiness, while stable, happy people are sometimes looked upon with skepticism, as if their lack of apparent problems makes them phony or untrustworthy. Our jadedness leads us to a sort of self-reinforcing stasis of raw brokenness, because this is what we believe. This is what we know. But what we really need are models of goodness & virtue in our lives... figures of hope who can motivate us out of the cycle of dreary cynicism.

It would be cliched and redundant to say that Blue Valentine is a heartbreaking film. That much is clear from its title. It is heartbreaking, devastating, a punch-to-the-gut... all that. Yes. But this is also a deeply observant film, with things to say not just about one couple and their problematic relationship, but about how we as a culture (or at least a particular segment/generation of it) think about things like romance, chivalry, marriage, love.

But almost everything in our digitized, cut-and-paste world these days has a tenuous relationship to reality. Perhaps that’s why these dubiously “true” films are nevertheless enjoyed and embraced, particularly by younger audiences. The idea of black and white, “true or untrue” doesn’t make much sense to a generation who has grown up with a steady stream of mediated half-truths, advertising, made-for-TV reflections on the news, The Real World, etc. It goes without saying that something can be enjoyable, moving, resonant, but completely fabricated. Even if it touts itself, with a wink, as “real."

Though by now we’re all a little fatigued by the flurry of end-of-year best-of lists, I’m going to go ahead and add to the critical chorus with my picks for the best films of 2010. This is the list I think about the most and put the most hours into compiling. That’s because I love films, see a lot of them (I saw upwards of 60 new releases in 2010), and want others to see them too. I will be posting a more in-depth analysis of the year in cinema this weekend (in which I also try to make sense of Banksy, Facebook and flashmobs). But for now, here are my picks for the best of the year...

Food is such a glorious, God-given focal point of life. Out of gratefulness for having it in such abundance and regularity, why not honor the memory of its high points this year? The following are my favorite 15 instances of Epicurean delight from the last year, in chronological order.

Because it's impossible (at least for me) to read enough new release books in one year to even begin to make claims to a “best of” list, my book list is strictly a “favorites” list. The following are five books that came out this year that delighted me, provoked me, informed me and thrilled me… books I’ll remember and will recommend to others.

Because 2010 was a great year for documentaries, here are my picks for the top 5 documentaries of the year. If you have Netflix, I believe all of these are available to rent or watch instantly.