- The Gospel According to Saint Matthew
The big new release this week is Ridley Scott’s actioner Exodus: Gods and Kings, his take on the ancient tale of the Hebrews and their Moses-led exit from Egypt. In his capsule review, Reader film editor J.R. Jones writes “[Scott] made this Biblical epic the old-fashioned way, casting thousands of extras instead of conjuring them up digitally, and the movie works well as big-budget spectacle despite a ho-hum script,” suggesting the film is the director’s attempt at a Cecil B. DeMille-esque Bible spectacle, appropriate considering Scott’s classical sensibilities.
- A Serious Man (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009) Allegory and metaphor course through biblical text, and the Coen brothers take it another step further with this darkly humorous character study that doubles as an exegesis of the Book of Job. Like the text in question, as well as its ilk in the Old Testament, A Serious Man is deliberately opaque. The further you question it, the more questions arise, indicative of the inherent nihilism of spirituality, ancient or otherwise.
