Articles
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2010-09-14 12:12:34
Debuting today on DVD, the TV movie
Amish Grace broke multiple network records when it premiered this spring as the most-watched and highest-rated original movie in Lifetime Movie Network history. Inspired by the nonfiction book of the same title about the aftermath of the 2006 Amish school shooting in Lancaster, Pa., the film was produced by the Larry Thompson Organization, founded by Larry A. Thompson, an executive producer on the film.
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2010-09-07 06:30:58
A Town Called Panic may be the most oddball thing you see all year, if you see it, which you probably won’t, although perhaps you should. How can I explain it?
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2010-06-18 08:26:31
Hollywood’s ambivalence about fatherhood is deeply entrenched. Ambivalence, though, is not mere hostility; often it is rooted in a real awareness of the irreplaceable importance of fatherhood, and in melancholy or anger over paternal failure in a fallen, broken world.
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2010-06-14 13:48:02
That the Magdalene asylums represent a phenomenon as deserving of critical scrutiny as the trial of Joan of Arc or the ecclesiastical abandonment of the Guaraní missions, I don’t question. Mullan, however, betrays his subject with smug Catholic-bashing. It’s a tragedy that the enormity of what went wrong at the Magdalene asylums has been trivialized by cheap manipulation.
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2010-06-14 13:48:00
The Ryan report confirms the substantial truth of the sort of stories dramatized in
The Magdalene Sisters. These stories need to be told. But the report also reconfirms my fundamental objection to the
way that
The Magdalene Sisters tells its story, depicting the world of the asylums
solely in terms of unremitting abuse, cruelty and sadism unbroken by any hint of kindness or humane treatment. This is not in accordance with the memories of those who endured the Irish institutions, according to the Ryan report.
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2010-05-29 17:48:04
Alejandro Amenábar’s
Agora is a work of hagiography, and, for that matter, of anti-hagiography. Among its burdens are that Hypatia of Alexandria, the celebrated neo-Platonic philosopher and mathematician, is worthy of veneration, and also that Cyril of Alexandria, saint and doctor of the Church, is not. Neither of these theses is without prima facie plausibility, or unworthy of serious-minded and nuanced exploration.
Agora is serious-minded to a fault, but nuance, while not absent, is lacking.
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2010-05-05 14:44:26
Opening on Mother’s Day weekend, French director Thomas Balmès’
Babies documents the first year in the life of four babies from four different corners of the world: Mongolia, Namibia, San Francisco and Tokyo. Balmès, who lives in Paris with his wife and three children, discussed his film over the phone with me.
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2010-04-23 09:38:41
British filmmaker Michael Whyte lives in West London’s Notting Hill area across the square from a Carmelite monastery, Most Holy Trinity. For years he wondered about the building across the square; then one day he inquired about making a documentary there.
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2010-03-01 07:09:18
Miyazaki’s whole body of work (less one or two sub-par exceptions) offers unduplicated vistas of imaginative wonder and beauty, images of startling power, admirable and likable heroines and heroes, humanely conceived supporting characters, elusively engaging storytelling, wholesome moral themes, and unexpected sly humor. He is the sort of artist whose work doesn’t just entertain audiences, but wins enthusiasts. For those who haven’t yet discovered him, Miyazaki is a taste well worth acquiring.
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2010-02-13 07:50:27
Horror represents a field many Christians approach with trepidation, and rightly so. The horror shelves of bookstores and video stores are very largely a wasteland of mindless, tasteless trash; indeed, there may be no other genre as disproportionately overrun with junk. Yet the grotesque, the macabre, and the frightful have an abiding place in human imagination and culture — a place that Christian sensibility has historically not seen fit to reject or condemn, at least entirely.
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2010-02-04 03:55:16
More wordless Aardman animation on DVD!
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2010-01-22 05:53:25
It was a year of quirky, darkly mature childhood fantasy adaptations. Neil Gaiman’s juvenile horror-thriller
Coraline, Maurice Sendak’s picture book
Where the Wild Things Are and Roald Dahl’s young reader
Fantastic Mr. Fox were each made into unique, challenging films in radically different styles by directors Henry Selick, Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson, respectively.
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2010-01-08 05:49:20
Like its protagonist, Saint Joseph Desa of Cupertino, throughout much of his lifetime and most of the film, Edward Dmytryk’s 1962 film
The Reluctant Saint is a modest affair that has attracted little attention, but has more to offer than meets the eye.
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2009-11-20 08:07:51
There is even a
Twilight tourism industry, centered on Washington State, where much of the story is set. While Robert Langdon fans get to go to Rome and Paris for the Dan Brown experience, Stephenie Meyer aficionados converge on rainy Forks, Washington to take “Twilighter tours” of locations more or less corresponding to settings in the books, from a Craftman-style house similar to the Swans’ to a locker at Forks High School designated Bella’s locker.
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2009-10-23 05:26:00
Miami’s brand-new John Paul II International Film Festival (October 27–November 7) aspires to be a festival with a difference.
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2009-08-05 08:51:03
To summarize: What we have is an informal, brief, obscurely worded opinion, in a private letter that may or may not have been written by Ratzinger himself, apparently declining to comment on a book that he may or may not have perused about a series of books he may or may not have ever laid eyes on.
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2009-05-15 04:19:30
When Sony Pictures, the production company behind the hit film
The Da Vinci Code and the new sequel
Angels & Demons, reached out to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN management in Geneva saw a high-profile teachable moment for science.
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2009-05-08 01:59:47
In a Q&A billed as an “interview” on his own website, Brown writes (in a comment recently highlighted by Carl Olson in
This Rock), “My goal is always to make the character’s [
sic] and plot be so engaging that readers don’t realize how much they are learning along the way.” Or how much misinformation they’re absorbing.
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2009-01-23 12:41:20
Jeffrey Overstreet called the
movie year 2006 “the year of the nightmare.” I’m starting to think we haven’t woken up yet.
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2009-01-02 05:50:26
For family audiences, 2008 was a good year at the cineplex — but an even better year for DVD releases overall. In fact, in 2008 quality entertainment for families as well as older viewers came by the boxload.
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2008-12-19 07:14:42
Wall‑E is more than another confirmation of Pixar’s moviemaking virtuosity and magic touch with family audiences. It’s the crown jewel in a year that had in some respects had a bit more to offer family audiences from Hollywood than other recent years.
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2008-12-12 10:46:59
An old witticism has it that Golden Age Hollywood was “a Jewish-owned business selling Catholic theology to Protestant America.” If not strictly accurate, the
bon mot contains more than a kernel of truth.
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2008-11-28 14:45:11
Chastity is a precious thing, and the struggle to be chaste is both an inevitable part of a moral life and a legitimate subject for narrative art. In part, this quest for chastity may legitimately form some part of
Twilight’s appeal. At the same time, a narrative that wallows in the intoxicating power of temptation and desire, that returns again and again to rhapsodizing about the beauty of forbidden fruit, may reasonably be felt to be a hindrance rather than an affirmation of self-mastery.
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2008-11-06 00:00:00
By rights, pulp heroes like Batman and James Bond belong to this world of escapism, not the world of
The Godfather. Bond was even one of the original inspirations for Indiana Jones. (“I’ve got something better than James Bond” was how Lucas pitched the character to Steven Spielberg.) Now, though, the boundaries are becoming less clear.
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2008-07-11 04:37:59
You won’t find the gospel in movies like
Hellboy. What you may find is signs of a world that has been touched by the gospel — a world that retains some awareness of sinister forces to be avoided or resisted, of evil that cannot be overcome by therapy or education or communication, that calls for a response from another realm entirely.
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2008-05-15 14:05:52
Speaking by phone from New York, producer Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s stepson and heir, suggested that the new film’s more mature tone was partly a reflection of the book itself. “
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was written very much to be read aloud,” Gresham explained. “With
Prince Caspian, in [Lewis’s] mind his audience had moved up a few years in age, and so
Prince Caspian was written for them to read to themselves.”
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2008-04-18 06:00:53
The most serious problem with
Constantine’s Sword, though, is not its historical distortions. The most serious problem is its out-and-out attack on Christianity as such. It is not merely antisemitism that troubles Carroll. It is not even only Jesus’ death and resurrection. Ultimately, it is the very belief that in Jesus God did something both unique and definitive, something with universal applicability for all mankind.
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2008-02-29 11:27:04
No critic can offer a one-size-fits-all approach for all committed Christians. I can’t, and have never tried to, tell anyone what to think or watch, or make definitive pronouncements about good or bad movies. I’m not the Pope; I’m not even the pope of movies. There is no pope of movies. Even the Pope isn’t the pope of movies.
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2008-01-18 11:19:40
2007 was a remarkable DVD year for fans of the Vatican film list.
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2008-01-18 11:13:41
There were ultrasounds. Disturbing images of post-abortion fetuses. Mention of fetal heartbeat and ability to feel pain. One way or another, over half a dozen 2007 films found themselves reckoning with the reality of life in the womb. It’s fair to call 2007 the cinematic year of the unborn child.
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