What a good director does.

I love to watch movies. Unfortunately, one of the problems of having watched a lot of movies is that it becomes harder and harder to surprise me. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that I generally want a movie to end in a satisfying way, which of course further limits the options a filmmaker has when creating his art for me.

A good movie thus manages to do several different things. It identifies a character with whom I can bond and vicariously live through. This character will then have some significant struggles which create tension and the hope of a final triumph to overcome them. Most importantly, the means of this triumph need to be plausible after the fact but so unforeseeable in advance that you actually start to worry it won’t turn out right. When all of these factors come together properly, we say that a movie “pays off” in giving you what you really want from it.

And when you find a director who can consistently do this, it’s a real joy to experience his movies. Of course, the real question is whether I believe God is as clever and reliable at directing my life as these men are in making their films.