Michael Phillips

Fear Not!

Arts & Literature

“In Fear Not!, film critic and Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen walks with zombies, exorcises demons, sprints from Blair witches to The Babadook to Jordan Peele—and reframes every kind of screen horror as a spiritual inquiry few of us have ever contemplated. It is an excellent addition to anyone’s bookshelf.”

Movies Are Prayers

Arts & Literature

“Going far beyond a simple assessment of Christlike martyr figures (the movies are lousy with 'em), Josh Larsen's passionate and movingly reflective new book makes an inspiring case for treating a provocative variety of films as prayers for all seasons. He writes on everything from Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life to Michael Haneke's Amour, teasing out the filmmakers' insatiable desire to wrestle with the unknowable. But his democratically theological approach to the medium he loves brings into play unexpected gems: Polanski's Chinatown, or Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (to which Larsen took his future wife on a date). 'Many films,' he writes, 'even the challenging ones, are capable of functioning as messy, mixed-up, miraculous prayer.' I've long been engaged by Larsen's film criticism on Filmspotting, but his book seeks and finds a higher power and a more mysterious set of concerns, somewhere out past the lobby.”