'First Reformed' review: Ethan Hawke's bracing dark night of the soul
"A life without despair is a life without hope," says the man at the center of Paul Schrader's "First Reformed." That paradox embraces the world as it is, and suggests a better world for the making. The movie it belongs to is an act of spiritual inquiry, a coolly assured example of cinematic scholarship in subtly deployed motion and one of the strongest pictures of 2018.
It's also one of those third-act miracles all too rare in American filmmaking. Now 71, writer-director Schrader has remained busy across five
