"Modern audiences are generally bad. We surrender uncritically or not at all, and the failure of many performances is in the audience. We are both too desensitized and too detached; we want to be entertained and aloof, and in neither mood are we truly engaged.

"I think we should be able to be taken in. Not uncritically, but the inability to be taken in is a deficiency as much as the refusal to be taken in. Tolstoy plays on this theme, and the film doubly explodes the conceit."

Read more: Father Micah Snell, Mere Orthodoxy