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The Exorcist at 40

October 31, 2013  •  National Review Online

Garnering a great deal of attention in this, its 40th-anniversary year, The Exorcist remains the most terrifying film ever made. Re-released in a Blu-ray edition with new commentary tracks and features showing screenwriter (and author of the original novel) William Peter Blatty and director William Friedkin revisiting the Georgetown locations of the film, The Exorcist holds up remarkably well nearly half a century later.

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review of 12 Years a Slave

October 19, 2013  •  National Review Online

In his treatment of slavery in the American South in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville contrasts modern with ancient slavery. While ancient slavery, he wrote, typically aimed to constrain only the body — to force the enslaved into servile work – modern slavery aims to entrap the mind. It "overturns the order of nature," constituting what Tocqueville chillingly called "spiritualized despotism and violence." That thesis is amply illustrated in the compelling new film from the London-born black director Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave, which boasts an all-star cast and a gripping story based on a mid-19th-century autobiography by a free black man, Solomon Northrup, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery.

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Real Men of West Monroe

August 24, 2013  •  National Review Online

In one episode of the A&E reality show Duck Dynasty, which is about a family-run business in West Monroe, La., that manufactures duck calls, CEO Willie Robertson installs cameras at the plant to monitor the workers. The employees, most of whom happen to be his brothers and an uncle, rebel against the surveillance, saying they will not be constantly watched.

Of course, that's the essence of reality TV: subjecting oneself to being constantly watched. And in the case of Duck Dynasty, lots of people are watching. Last week, the hour-long season-four premiere brought in 11.8 million viewers, the largest number ever for a nonfiction cable show.

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review of Blue Jasmine

August 16, 2013  •  National Review Online

Woody Allen's latest, Blue Jasmine, ranks right at the top among his films over the last ten years. To be sure, given the apparent decline in his filmmaking skills, that's not all that noteworthy. What is remarkable here is the performance he coaxes from Cate Blanchett, perhaps the finest of her career, as a woman leveled by fortune and her own character flaws. It is instructive that Allen succeeds here by the construction of finely drawn details of storytelling and character development. Blue Jasmine is smaller in scale than, say, Midnight in Paris or Vicky Cristina Barcelona (to cite two of his moderately well-done recent films), less overtly philosophical than the disappointing You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger or Match Point, and void of the snide left-wing ideology of the tedious Whatever Works. By contrast, Blue Jasmine is a compelling character study of a soul desperately in need of, and in flight from, self-knowledge.

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Education nourishes the soul

April 26, 2013  •  The Baylor Lariat

"The true college," writes the African-American author W.E.B. DuBois (in words etched in stone in the walkway at Brooks Residential College), "will ever have one goal – not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes."

In "The Souls of Black Folk," which contains the most eloquent defenses of liberal education ever written by an American, DuBois opposed the exclusion of African-Americans from the right to vote and from civic equality. But he objected equally to the exclusion of African-Americans from the pursuit of a truly liberal education, to their being limited to a merely instrumental education, and education in a trade.

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Books by Thomas Hibbs