Catholic Film Reviews

reviewed by John Murphy
Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest was a novel about Hitler narrated by a demon, who writes: “Most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil…There need be no surprise, then, that the world has an impoverished understanding of Adolf Hitler’s personality.” I was [...]

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Elegy, adapted from Philip Roth’s novella, The Dying Animal, aspires to be a meditation on the two capital-letter subjects, Sex and Death. As such, its insights are hardly revelatory: “It’s not about growing old, it’s about growing up,” observes a supporting character, helpfully supplying the movie’s main theme for any note-takers in the audience.
I should [...]

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The last word spoken in Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is “panache.” It’s a single-word summation of all that came before. Cyrano — like Falstaff, Captain Ahab or Robin Hood — is a literary character turned worldwide phenomenon.  He is the big-nosed, swashbuckling poet who embodies “panache,” and has captured the hearts and imaginations of [...]

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The challenge of adapting Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo for the screen, large or small, is of such a colossal magnitude that perhaps only Nostromo himself, the novel’s hero and “a man in a thousand” should have been charged with the task. The difficulties start with the logistics of the production. Set in a fictional South American [...]

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Henry Poole Is Here could almost be the Catholic/Christian answer to Leaving Las Vegas. It is a quietly artful treatment of one suicidal man’s encounter with the miraculous, and his subsequent reversal from death to life.
When given only six weeks to live by his doctor, Henry Poole resolves to drink himself to death in a [...]

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Body of Lies is a slick political thriller that only begins to be bothersome later, in quieter moments, when its implications can be mulled over minus the mind-numbing sound and fury. During its running time, veteran action-painter Ridley Scott (Gladiator, American Gangster) delivers a fast-paced, tightly-edited genre exercise about a CIA operative (Leonardo Dicaprio) combating [...]

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First, in case you missed it, we posted originally, ca. Season One, on LOST and the persistence of Christian tropes.
As for the rest of this post: SPOILER ALERT. Clan Murphy is rapidly getting caught up on LOST, and (as of this post) have just finished the mid-fourth-season episode ttiled “The Constant”. If you aren’t at [...]

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Directed by Ronald Neame
Starring Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens
Based on a classic novel by Catholic writer, Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a flawed but mostly effective adaptation, thanks in large part to the heroic efforts of Maggie Smith. Her Academy-award winning performance as the title character manages to be both iconic [...]

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Reviewed by John Murphy
He is a brooding Catalan painter in a red shirt (danger!) who looks like Javier Bardem but is named Juan Antonio. They are Vicky and Cristina (Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson), two American Best-Friends-Forever visiting relatives for a summer in Barcelona. The painter makes them a semi-Indecent Proposal: fly with him to [...]

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Directed by Julian Jarrold
Starring Matthew Goode, Emma Thompson, Ben Whishaw, and Michael Gambon
So…Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh is one of the twentieth century’s classic novels. It’s not especially long. A week or so should do the trick. Don’t have the time? Well, there was a superlative miniseries adaptation of the novel produced by Granada in [...]

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