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 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...