Filmmaker Pippa Ehrlich won an Oscar for My Octopus Teacher and her follow-up is another study of a surprising human-animal relationship. Pangolins are strange but photogenic anteater- like mammals covered in scales, and when a South African man rescues a baby pangolin from poachers and names him Kulu, he also assumes the burden of helping the creature survive the return to the wild. Monday, April 21, Netflix.

by Elaine Pagels

The compelling latest book from the best-selling religious scholar Elaine Pagels is “a kind of culminating work,” said Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. For the first time, the author of The Gnostic Gospels has written a volume focused on Jesus, and it charts “a reasonable middle ground” between scholarly skepticism and an appreciation of the extra-rational power of the stories told about Jesus in the New Testament. Pagels accepts as a given that Jesus existed. But starting with the Bible’s claims that he was born to a virgin, Pagels unpacks the miracles ascribed to him to explain what Scripture’s writers were up to when they recorded such tales. Instead of scolding the faith’s early Evangelists for the Gospels’ departures from verifiable fact, “Pagels revels in the contradictions and the inconsistencies not as flaws to be explained away but as signs of the faith’s capaciousness.” 

“As Pagels portrays them, the Evangelists were men of creative genius,” said Judith Shulevitz in The Atlantic. While the idea of Jesus as savior was spreading during the first decades after his crucifixion, the writers of the four canonical Gospels were busy turning the evidence against the claims of his divinity into the foundation of a faith that soon swept the world. When skeptics charged that he was the son of an unmarried woman and a Roman soldier, two Gospels put forth the idea of his virgin birth. Confronted with Jesus’ later trial and execution, the Gospel writers presented that ignominious end as central to his divine mission. A side effect of the story’s recasting, Pagels tells us, is that Pontius Pilate, Judea’s notoriously cruel Roman ruler, emerged in the New Testament as a fair-minded man who perceived Jesus’ righteousness. The faith’s proselytizers apparently thought it better to appease Rome’s rulers than to further provoke them. 

When I finished my journey through Pagels’ book, “the mystery of Jesus himself had deepened,” said Leigh Haber in the Los Angeles Times. Though I’d learned much about the early history of Christianity, including about the noncanonical gospels that Pagels had explored in her break- through 1979 book, it struck me as “nothing short of miraculous that one person’s words and actions—and the storytelling around that individual—continue to resonate in all realms of society and culture, in all corners of the world.” Pagels credits the faith’s enduring popularity to its promotion of the potent and norm-breaking idea that all people are created equal. To me, an even better explanation is that the story that recast Jesus as Christ is “a tale of hope emerging from darkness.”

The actor who played Iceman and Batman

Val Kilmer smoldered with intensity, for better and for worse. The Adonis-faced actor had a reputation for disappearing into his roles: Critic Roger Ebert called his turn as singer Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991) “not a case of casting, but of possession.” Other high-profile roles included aviator Tom “Iceman” Kazansky in the smash hit Top Gun (1986), gunfighter Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1993), and Batman in Batman Forever (1995). But Kilmer was also known as an eccentric perfectionist who could be a nightmare on set. “The Man Hollywood Loves to Hate,” Entertainment Weekly dubbed him in a 1996 story; directors called him “childish,” “impossible,” and a “damaged megalomaniac.” Kilmer was unapologetic. “I have behaved poorly. I have behaved bravely. I have behaved bizarrely to some,” he said in 2021. “I deny none of this and have no regrets because I have lost and found parts of myself that I never knew existed.” 

Kilmer grew up in the Los Angeles suburb of Chatsworth, Calif., where his father was a real estate developer, said the Los Angeles Times. Destined for acting, he performed in TV commercials as a kid and at 16 was accepted into the prestigious Juilliard drama program. The night before he left, his younger brother drowned in a swimming pool; Kilmer said “he never fully recovered.” After graduating he appeared off-Broadway, then gained notice in Real Genius (1985) before he “broke through” as Tom Cruise’s rival in Top Gun. It was in The Doors, though, “that he earned movie star status.” With typical intensity Kilmer “immersed himself” in playing Morrison, said The Times (U.K.). He studied videos of the singer “obsessively” and sang so convincingly that Morrison’s former bandmates couldn’t tell the two voices apart. 

Kilmer’s bad reputation peaked with the filming of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), a “disastrous production” marred by his tantrums and feuding, said Variety. Soon “studio roles dwindled,” and he “appeared mostly in independent films and supporting roles.” Keeping a home base on a New Mexico ranch, he spent years touring a one-man Mark Twain show, Citizen Twain. In 2021, seven years after he was diagnosed with the throat cancer that stole his voice, he was the subject of a documentary, Val, depicting him as “an introspective thinker with an artist’s soul.” He told an interviewer that year that he would change nothing about his career, saying, “I’ve witnessed and experienced miracles.”