For much of the twentieth century, films about faith were either earnest epics such as The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Robe or syrupy depictions of self-effacing clergy as in The Bells of St. Mary’s and Boys Town. The end of the old production code in the late ’60s provided new opportunities not only for more challenging depictions of “religion” but even for outright mockery. Religious characters were often rendered as fanatics and lunatics: think Carrie’s mom or the deranged fan in Misery. Even the basis for religion was called into question, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to Bill Maher’s Religulous.

Yet even in this age of the “nones,” explorations of a spiritual dimension to life remain rich fodder for entertainment. Even the DC and Marvel universes “invite us to wrestle with religious themes regarding evil, morality, the good life, and sacrificial life,” as Micah Watson declares in Film and Faith: Modern Cinema and the Struggle to Believe, co-edited with Carson Holloway and part of a fascinating project called the “Politics, Literature, and Film series.” The films under discussion in this volume are not all about religion per se yet speak at least implicitly to the perils of self-sufficiency, the notion that we can save ourselves or live without a purpose beyond ourselves.

The book is broken into three parts touching on each of these emphases. Part I, “Sin and Alienation in a Fallen World,” focuses on Robert Eggers’ The Northman, Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, and Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air. Rather than dutifully revisit each film, I’ll cherry-pick a handful of examples that best illustrate the writers’ exploration of the “Easter eggs”—those intimations of the divine, the good, the transcendent. From Part I, Gran Torino is the film most readers will likely be familiar with.

The legendary Clint Eastwood is Walt Kowalski, the quintessential “Get off my lawn” grumpy old man who has watched his wife die, his kids leave, and his neighborhood transform into a homestead for Asian immigrants. If Walt wants anything in life, it’s simply to be left alone.

But the world intrudes and he winds up taking a young Hmong neighbor under his wing, and finally the entire Hmong community into his care, such that he is the only thing, supposedly, that stands between his newfound friends and a gang of hoodlums.

Yet a showdown between—as it turns out—a dying cowboy Clint and the bad guys is not so much satisfying as creepy. As his cruciform carcass collapses to the ground before eyewitnesses, who will ensure that the bad guys are put away for life, we’re expected to draw an explicitly Christian message about the merit of laying down one’s life for one’s friends. Unfortunately, as one of Film and Faith’s contributors, Matthew J. Franck, exhaustively makes clear: it fails on moral grounds. The theme may be a noble one—self-sacrifice in the face of evil—but the morality as played out is as daft as that demonstrated in another overpraised Eastwood outing—Million Dollar Baby, with its consequence-free mercy killing.

As Franck notes:

It might be argued in Walt’s defense that all he really did was stand on the gangsters’ lawn, taunt them as they brandished firearms, and then suddenly withdraw his hand from his jacket holding only his cigarette lighter. He did not actually cause his own death. … But this is sophistry. If the gangsters had not opened fire, Walt would have achieved none of the objectives that brought him to their house that night. … He wants them in prison for a long time. … And he plainly wants his own life to be over as well, to foreclose his own future of suffering. … Walt’s actions are wrong. And they are gravely mortal sins.

In short, instead of committing suicide by cop, Walt commits suicide by thug.

As for the Catholic priest who’s been pestering Walt throughout the film to make a good confession: “At Walt’s funeral, the pastor pays tribute to Walt unreservedly, saying how much he learned from him. This is merely the last failure of a screenplay to understand the church that Father Janovich represents.” Or a failure to produce a “movie priest” who could convincingly warn Walt that his good intentions may not result in good ends.

Part II of Film and Faith is entitled “The Workings of Grace in a Fallen World.” Francis J. Beckwith’s opening essay is an elegantly written defense of It’s a Wonderful Life against critics on the left and right. While some feminists see in Mary Bailey only an object of doomed domesticity, and a postliberal like Patrick Deneen sees in George an almost rapacious “ambition to alter the landscape to accommodate modern life,” Beckwith insists that, in fact, Mary (Donna Reed) is the hero of the story, twice saving George Bailey’s (Jimmy Stewart) savings and loan, and in turn his life. Moreover, she saves George from the very life he dreamed of, one “unencumbered by nation, heritage, home, and nation,” the very deracination Deneen decries.

Christopher Tollefsen also had me rethinking Alfonso Cuarón’s award-winning space thriller Gravity. I was strangely unmoved by it when it debuted; my cynical take at the time was that it was just “Julia” in space, that rootless virtual-person whom the Barack Obama campaign thought would serve as an effective advertisement for a bureaucratized, subsidized life, and whose inner reserves enable her finally to stand on her own two feet—still alone.

But Tollefsen’s careful reading enables a more generous interpretation: the core of Dr. Ryan Stone’s (Sandra Bullock) character arc is an evolution from “solitude … tinged with the vice of pride” to gratitude, even though it’s unclear to whom exactly she is grateful. But we do learn for what.

The narrative is set off by Stone’s and fellow astronaut Matt Kowalski’s (George Clooney) attempt to save themselves from being permanently disconnected from the International Space Station after some Russian space debris destroys their space shuttle. In the process, Kowalski must, Christ-like, sacrifice himself so Stone can live. Only, as with all attempts to play God, it’s not that simple—the ISS, too, is destroyed by a return orbital visit from that very same debris, and Stone must find a way home using a spacecraft that is, unfortunately, out of fuel.

So there Stone hangs, deep in space, utterly alone, dying of hypoxia, when who should appear but Kowalski, offering Stone, still grieving the loss of a child, a choice: “You can shut down all the systems, turn out all the lights … and just close your eyes. … I mean, what’s the point of going on? What’s the point of living? Your kid died.” Or she can “start livin’ life.”

She chooses life.

But was Kowalski merely a hallucination—or an angel, a messenger, a sign of a transcendent someone—come to rescue her if only she would accept help from outside herself?

Tollefsen insists on the latter interpretation: “Rescue by hallucination is the true deus ex machina here. … And it is bad science—the effects of hypoxia on decision-making are characteristically poor. … I suggest that only the mercy of God … who draws good out of the greatest evil, is religiously, philosophically, and cinematically the correct answer here.”

R. Michael Olson takes on Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, a film that was “the source of much criticism” regarding a “lack of external narrative coherence and character development.” Anyone familiar with Malick’s 2011 Tree of Life will recognize the lyrical, disjointed, Billy Pilgrim–esque unstuck-in-time quality, in which conventional storytelling is chucked for a more impressionistic vision of one character’s “pilgrimage.”

Rick (Christian Bale) is an LA-based screenwriter whose life appears to be little more than a series of hookups with beautiful women. And yet each of them has something to say about the unexpressed yearning for something higher in life than fleeting pleasures and a better Hollywood deal. Juxtaposed against these encounters are flashbacks to childhood and interactions with his father (Brian Dennehy), who recalls the Hymn of the Pearl, a mythic story of a young prince who sets off to find that “pearl of great price” but who forgets his purpose, waylaid by the distractions of the world. In narration, the father tells and retells the story as if to call his son back to his original purpose.

In the end, after one particularly transgressive relationship with a woman (Natalie Portman) with whom he genuinely falls in love, Rick suffers real loss, but in so doing, gains a life of permanence. “Providence moves individuals to their good by sowing the seeds of discontent in any satisfaction that failed to satisfy the innermost longs of the heart.”

Finally, Part III of Film and Faith, “Faith and the Confrontation with Radical Evil,” takes a walk on the very dark side. Micah Watson begins by bringing into relief the descent/ascent motif found in Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises, following Bruce Wayne’s personal trajectory from vengeance-chasing orphaned youth to justice-seeking superhero to reborn family man. The various villains bring him into contact with different types of evil, ultimately tracing a redemptive arc spiritual in nature.

Jordan J. Ballor details the exploits of the Marvel Universe “gods,” making the pointed distinction between the “truly transcendent and the merely magnificent.” Ballor’s take on Thanos, for example, as both a symbol of unfathomable evil and a “not very good economist,” is both fun and telling, especially in light of current activist agitations.

Thanos represents a neo-Malthusian villain, one who affirms the logic of absolute finitude and radical material scarcity. … As he puts it to Gamora, “It’s simple calculus. This universe is finite; its resources are finite. If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correcting.” Thanos offers a corrective: reduction of all life by half across the cosmos.

Let me end with Carson Holloway’s successful effort to redeem No Country for Old Men from the charge of nihilism, one I indulged when I saw the film in theaters. “The filmmakers seem to stack the deck in order to achieve the film’s apparently nihilistic effect. In the first place, Anton Chigurh is not exactly a plausible human character. … Additionally, in No Country’s universe, fortune is not merely indifferent to virtue but positively perverse.”

I, too, had dismissed No Country as another affected, self-consciously “cinematic” Coen brothers’ dead end, but Holloway’s careful reading converted me. The mistake is to see No Country as being about the bad guy. Instead, it’s about a traditional Hollywood good guy, the local sheriff, Bell (Tommy Lee Jones): “a kind of traditionalist conservative, … a lifetime lawman, a proud member of a line of lawmen.” But when this old-fashioned guy is confronted with radical evil in the person of Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who possesses not “an inordinate attachment to some real good” but a sadistic need to show everyone who crosses his path the utter worthlessness of their existence, Bell is lost.

Why? The lawman is unable to contend with Chigurh’s perverse brand of lawbreaking because he fears God has abandoned him and that “he may somehow be drawn into this evil.” In the end, Bell “quits” the fight because a “low estimate of himself arises from a vain aspiration to self-sufficiency.” When you believe you’re in a fight against the odds all by yourself, that you’ve lost God as your backup, what else is there to do but turn tail and run? (Contrast this with Franz Jäggerstätter’s exemplary fortitude, ably explicated in Thomistic turns by Jennifer Frey in her essay on A Hidden Life, a more-or-less true-life story of an Austrian farmer’s steadfast resistance to pledging allegiance to Adolf Hitler.)

As I hope I’ve conveyed, Film and Faith is smart but never obtuse, entertaining but never frivolous, and thorough but never overstuffed. It will leave the reader, religious or not, with an enhanced critical vocabulary, better able to espy the spiritual depths even of those films that on first viewing appear to be thoroughly secular.