Latest Articles

If Sigmund Freud Met C.S. Lewis

April 24, 2012  •  The Catholic World Report

Toward the end of the play Freud's Last Session, a fictional conversation about the meaning of human life between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis concludes, "How mad, to think we could untangle the world's greatest mystery in one hour." Freud responds, "The only thing more mad is to not think of it at all." The combined sense of the limits to human knowledge and the unavoidability of the big questions is one of the many impressive features of this dramatic production, the remote origins of which are in a popular class of Dr. Armand Nicholi, professor of psychiatry in the Harvard Medical School. Nicholi penned a book, The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life, which the playwright Mark St. Germain turned into an off-Broadway play, now in its second year in New York and just beginning a run in Chicago.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

review of Damsels in Distress

April 20, 2012  •  National Review Online

Damsels in Distress, Whit Stillman's first film since 1998's The Last Days of Disco, focuses on the lives of a group of co-eds at a fictional East Coast college that is dominated by a boorish and vulgar male mentality. The young women (Greta Gerwig as Violet, Megalyn Echikunwoke as Rose, and Carrie MacLemore as Heather) devote themselves to reforming the male-dominated ethos of the college with the goal of rescuing students from all sorts of evils, everything from suicidal depression to unsavory odors. As is always the case in Stillman films — which in addition to Disco include Metropolitan and Barcelona — the main characters are quaint and innocent; this film is more overtly comic than his previous entries and less situated in a determinate social milieu. Damsels is about what has been lost, about the absence among the young of any clear mores governing relations between the sexes. Beneath the comic veneer, it is a remarkably perceptive commentary on what ails the contemporary liberal-arts college.

Continue to the full review  |  More reviews and articles

Oscar Surprises

February 24, 2012  •  National Review Online

What an unusual list of Oscar nominees for Best Picture — sentimental and populist. Among the nominated films, there are no movies making big social or political statements, nor are there the usual films with dark themes. There is nothing to rival Brokeback Mountain, The Kids Are All Right, Milk, or even Black Swan, Precious, or Winter's Bone. Oscar took a pass on the politically charged Iron Lady, even if Meryl Streep received an inevitable nod for Best Actress. Also overlooked was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the remake of a Swedish film, featuring grisly sexual violence, a decent murder-mystery investigation, and an all-too-predictable discovery as to the source of the evil.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

review of Young Adult

January 30, 2012  •  First Things

The new film Young Adult, the latest from the writer/director team of Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody of Juno fame, features Charlize Theron as Mavis Gary, a writer of young adult fiction living in the Twin Cities who returns to the small town of Mercury, MN to relive her glory days as a high school prom queen and to reclaim her former beau, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson). Although it is not without its funny moments, Young Adult is hardly a pleasant film. Yet it is a compelling and instructive one; in a Hollywood culture that celebrates perpetual adolescence, Young Adult is a rarity, an unsparing depiction of what it is like to remain trapped in adolescent fantasy.

Continue to the full review  |  More reviews and articles

Oscar Nominations: The Year of Sentimental Populism

January 24, 2012  •  National Review Online

What an unusual list of Oscar nominees for Best Picture — sentimental and populist. Among the nominated films, there are no movies with big social or political statements, nor are there the usual films with dark themes. There is nothing to rival Brokeback Mountain, The Kids Are All Right, Milk, or even Black Swan, Precious, or Winter's Bone. Oscar took a pass on the politically charged Iron Lady, even if Streep received an inevitable nod for Best Actress. Also overlooked was Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, the remake of a Swedish film, featuring grisly sexual violence, a decent murder mystery investigation and an all too predictable discovery as to the source of the evil.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

Books by Thomas Hibbs