Contributor: Paul Asay

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan’s epic Batman trilogy ends by sinking its grappling hooks deep into matters of life and death and rebirth.

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Emmy Nominees: Rated TV-MA

Nominees for this year’s Emmy awards were released this morning, and many of the nominees have been showered with Emmy love many times before. AMC’s Mad Men—winner of the Outstanding Drama Emmy for each of its first four seasons— was nominated 17 times …

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Movie Monday: Ice Age Drifts to the Front

Wedged between two iconic superheroes, Manny made the most of it. The lumbering mammoth and his motley band of prehistoric pals pulled Ice Age: Continental Drift into the numero uno slot for the weekend with an estimated $46 million. OK, so the animate …

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Ben-Hur (2016)

All the betrayal and thirst for revenge, and all its brutality, ultimately help highlight the movie’s heartening message: that love and forgiveness have more power than a thundering horde of chariots.

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A Conversation With Mirror Mirror’s Lily Collins

Movies are, by definition, trendy. Filmmakers want to make movies that folks want to see—movies that’ll grab their attention and, hopefully, bring them back for more. They’ll tap into whatever they think we’re interested, be it good (yay, superheroes!) …

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Movie Monday: The Amazing Spider-Man

Fireworks? Barbecues? Baseball? Hey, they were all viable ways to celebrate Independence Day during this weirdly elongated holiday “weekend.” But it seems as though when folks weren’t shooing away flies from the potato salad or slapping mosquitos in th …

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Not All Heroes Crawl Walls

I woke up in my own home this morning. Incredible. Last Wednesday, I wasn’t sure I had one. It’s been a week since the Waldo Canyon Fire blew up around our neighborhood, threatening my house and thousands more in the Colorado Springs area. I missed the …

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The Amazing Spider-Man

Ten years after Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man was released and officially launched our current cinematic superhero craze, Marvel delivers a reboot that might just set your Spidey senses a-tingling.

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Movie Monday: Ted

Well, it was a good run. For 15 straight weeks, the No. 1 movies in North America had borne a PG-13 rating or lower—many of them which would even qualify as “family friendly.” Not since 21 Jump Street was bumped by The Hunger Games way back in March ha …

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Fathers: Not Just Comic Relief Anymore

Just got through watching ABC Family’s new sitcom Baby Daddy (watch for the review tomorrow), and really the only thing remarkable about the show was how unremarkable it was. Baby Daddy felt as though it had been transported straight out of network tel …

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Beasts of the Southern Wild

Near the Louisiana coast there’s a place called the Bathtub, where people love the land and one another with an unparalleled passion. But will all that love save them from a hurricane blowing in?

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Where There’s Smoke, There’s Facebook

“Twitters broke, my life has no meaning anymore.” Those were the words of an unnamed tweeter who—in a spat of despondency—took to another, smaller social networking site to lament a temporary outage of Twitter last week. And she was far from the only p …

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Movie Monday: Brave

It was a showdown between an arrow-shooting heroine and an ax-swinging president—a family-friendly fairy tale versus R-rated blood and guts and teeth. As it turns out, it wasn’t much of a contest: A certain Scottish princess easily won the weekend’s ha …

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Brave

Pixar’s Brave is a quite good tale deftly told, filled with moments of insight, beauty and humor. And of course the animation is amazing. But in terms of content, it cowers ever so slightly.

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Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Four score and seven undead critters ago, Seth Grahame-Smith brought forth a new book—and then screenplay—that turned our nation’s 16th president into an ax-wielding vampire slayer, dedicated to the turning of stomachs equally and everywhere across this great land.

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