Catholic Film Reviews

Revenge is Sweat
Any Bond movie is greater than the sum of its parts. It has the whole weight of the 007 mythology behind it, and the ghost of Connery lurking in the wings. Daniel Craig has donned the tuxedo, spoken the line (“Bond. James Bond”) and driven the Aston Martin, but he’s made the role [...]

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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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Rumors have circulated for a long time that acclaimed filmmaker and seminary dropout, Martin Scorsese, was planning on directing a movie adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s powerful novel, Silence, a masterpiece of Catholic fiction. The National Catholic Register is reporting that the rumors are true, and frequent Scorsese collaborator/legendary art director, Dante Ferretti, was doing research [...]

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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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There are plenty of reasons to be a little down right about now. We’ve all heard the doom-and-gloom prognostications about this, that, and the other. The nightly news is depressing. The economy is in the can. The recession is deepening. February is approaching, one of the dreariest months of the year. Time to break out [...]

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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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Directed by Andrew Adamson
Starring Ben Barnes, William Moseley, and Georgie Henley
The first two installments of C.S. Lewis’ beloved Chronicles of Narnia have gotten the big-screen treatment, and my fingers are crossed that the producers will take the Harry Potter route for future adaptations and start parceling out directing duties piecemeal. Andrew Adamson, the director of [...]

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Directed by Jason Reitman
Starring Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, and Jason Bateman

So, I’d resisted admittance onto the Juno bandwagon. It came out last year and was met with instant critical acclaim, commercial success, and a rabid following. Roger Ebert named it the film of the year. Diablo Cody, the stripper-turned-screenwriter, won the Oscar [...]

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