Michael DeNobile's Movie Reviews

Originally published March 2016. Movie seen at Oswego 7 Cinemas in Oswego, NY. A REFLECTION AFTER WATCHING THE MOVIE MIRACLES FROM HEAVEN Michael DeNobile reviews the 2016 drama Miracles From Heaven, and its themes of religion, illness, and family. Why would a benevolent God allow His people, especially innocent children, suffer? Michael DeNobile admits that he has struggled with this very question since elementary school. When you're nine years old and faced with death, a parent, grandparent, or in Michael DeNobile’s case, a great-grandmother, the first cut is the deepest. As life goes on the wounds pile up: you discover your parents are not infallible superheroes, you are bullied, you heart is broken the first, second and third time, good friends from college die young, your dreams are deferred, your cousins who are not that much older than you are diagnosed with cancer and one dies while one struggles to survive, your 15yo student is struck and killed by an SUV, you watch ...

Originally published in December 2016. Movie seen at Oswego 7 Cinemas in Oswego, NY. A REFLECTION ON THE MOVIE COLLATERAL BEAUTY Film enthusiast Michael DeNobile discusses 2016 film Collateral Beauty and its themes of Love, Time, and Death. Love. Time. Death. Ultimately, these three are everyone's hauntings as we shuffle through this mortal coil, a coil as fragile as dominoes: taking a painful amount of Time and Love--risking even Death--that by a mere act of the smallest bit of kinetic energy, and they all fall down, breaking and shattering on the ground. But when they do all fall down, as they always do, how exactly do we find our way back? Michael DeNobile asks audiences, is it even finding our way back to the path or merely finding a way back to some path or another? In any case, in terms of Love, Time and Death, we seem to always settle for denial. We hide behind our excuses, addictions, lies that become truths, and blame everyone else but ourselves, enslaving our very s...

Originally published in December 2016. Movie seen at Oswego 7 Cinemas in Oswego, NY. A REFLECTION ON THE MOVIE PASSENGERS Michael DeNobile discusses themes presented in the 2016 sci-fi/romance Passengers, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.” ~Stephen Crane We are but specks of dust raging through space on a blue and green ball of chaos. We demand so much of the universe as we waste time through our day to day living. We expect to be thanked for the little we do for others. We expect others to present us with titles and awards attesting to this self-avowed greatness. We expect acknowledgement from the cosmos and dare God Himself to bow down before us as we struggle to be sinking ships adrift on a sea of stardust. And then some of us wake up too soon. We are forced to rise above the mundane and realize our insignificance, to stand on the...

Originally posted in March 2017. Movie seen at Oswego 7 Cinemas in Oswego, NY. A REFLECTION ON THE FILM THE SHACK Michael DeNobile discusses the 2017 box office hit, The Shack and provides insight regarding the film’s ethical questions.  To where shall we go to lay down the burdens of this life?--for the yolk is heavy, and I am weary that I will not finish the work. Time and time again, man is faced to reconcile himself to suffering, of the presence of evil on this side of Paradise. Ideally, goodness and joy would be the absence of pain, a world where we individually get to judge what is right and what is wrong, to decide who gets to be put asunder in Hell and who gets a Golden Ticket to the top floor of the Observation Deck. However, Michael DeNobile notes that if we get to judge others by the way they treat us, where shall we go when others judge ourselves? Will we be worthy of a Golden Ticket or will the elevator be sent to sub-level 4 of the Seventh Circle? In the age o...

Originally posted November 2017. A REFLECTION ON THE FILM A MONSTER CALLS When life gets too real, where can we summon the courage to face these realities? When we cannot reconcile how there can be paradoxical truths in this life, from where can we find the knowledge and wisdom of this world to solve these conundrums? When death robs the color of our worlds, when people rob us of our dignity, when our halos are broken and our wings folded, where can we learn to fly once again? Monsters exist in reality. Their mission is to steal us of our sanity, our peace, and our happiness. And there is only one way to compete with these real monsters, and that is to call upon imagined monsters to sojourn with us, to walk beside us, that in our imaginations we may find what is necessary to summon the courage to face reality, to call ourselves to action and to speak the truth: that we have the dignity that others deny us, that we are sometimes our worst enemies, that we don't kn...

Originally posted July 2017. Movie seen at Oswego 7 Cinemas in Oswego, NY. A REFLECTION OF THE MOVIE DUNKIRK (2017): Michael DeNobile shares his thoughts on the groundbreaking historical movie, DUNKIRK. ...we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, ... we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded ... would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old. ~Winston Churchill to the House of Commons, June 4, 1940, a...