Note: This review does not spoil key plot points. The Florida Project was the best film of 2017. I have been waiting for some time to write my review; the gravity of this film’s message demanded both multiple viewings and careful reflection. I can now say that Sean Baker has put together a magnificent and enduring work of art. The Florida Project is a gritty take on the elusivity and hollowness of the American dream.

Cookie-cutter houses and generic shopping centers are peppered across the fantastically unremarkable and uniform American suburbia. An appreciation of truly beautiful architecture has been jettisoned for the functionality demanded by a consumeristic culture. Alain de Botton, in his book The Architecture of Happiness, explains that “Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through the materials of the same tendencies to not understand

A few weeks back I received a postcard in the mail from a local non-denominational church inviting me to attend. The invitation also instructed me to bring the postcard with me to church in order to receive a free cup of coffee from their coffee shop. This was their gimmick, their way to get me in the door. Not the chance to meet my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, not the opportunity to worship with

One of the standard narratives of today’s age is that Americans are obsessed with stuff. We are said to be hedonistic materialistic monsters that will stop at nothing to possess the next new thing. In this critique of the current day and age, we are all the rich young ruler of Matthew 19, rejecting Christ due to our attachment with our many possessions. In our consumer culture, as Bill McKibben argues, we are compelled to

We are all consumers. As finite, dependent, embodied human beings, all of us need goods and services to survive, flourish, and enjoy the lives we each possess. For Americans, the vast majority of our consumption comes by means of the wages we receive from our employers, rather than home production as in agrarian societies. So the simple question arises, “How should Christian congregations and individuals faithfully engage with the modern market economy as consumers?”1 This