The Criteria crew continue their journey through the works of today's most significant Christian filmmaker, Terrence Malick. The New World is an underrated masterpiece about Pocahontas and the founding of Jamestown in 1607. Starring the 14-year-old Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas, Colin Farrell as John Smith, and Christian Bale as John Rolfe, Malic…

In occupied France during World War II, a Communist woman named Barny (Emmanuelle Riva) enters a confessional for the first time since her first Communion. She is there not to confess but to troll the priest by saying “Religion is the opiate of the people.” To her surprise, Fr. Léon Morin (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is not thrown off balance, but offers a…

Thomas and James discuss two classic Hollywood films dealing with the moral problems of overweening ambition - specifically in the context of show business. All About Eve (1950), which won six Oscars and features razor-sharp dialogue and an unforgettable performance by Bette Davis, is set in the world of the theater, while The Bad and the Beautiful…

Continuing our trek through the filmography of Terrence Malick, the world's greatest living Christian filmmaker, we arrive at The Thin Red Line (featuring Jim Caviezel in his breakthrough role). This film came in 1998 after Malick's twenty-year hiatus from directing movies, after which he never took such a long break again. Focused on the experienc…

There are many ways to make a movie. Only a few of those ways fit within the Hollywood mold. We believe that rather than taking pop culture as their sole model, Catholics and Catholic filmmakers should be open to a wide variety of artistic approaches. Thus, in this episode James and Thomas discuss the early career of the great Iranian director Abba…

You may be surprised to hear that one of the more morally profound new movies we’ve seen recently is a Godzilla reboot! The original 1954 Godzilla had its own ideas, being a way of processing Japan’s nuclear trauma and the ethical implications of superweapons. But the new Godzilla Minus One goes even deeper, examining not only the trauma of the war…

Widely considered one of the greatest films ever made, Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story is a quiet, gentle yet tragic family drama about the distance that can grow between elderly parents and their adult children. It's a critique of the transformation of culture and mores in postwar Japan, particularly the loss of filial piety, but it's not just specific…

There must be something in the water – everyone’s talking about the Vatican Film List! Just after the Criteria crew concluded three years going through the list, Word on Fire has published their own book about it, Popcorn with the Pope: A Guide to the Vatican Film List, with essays on all 45 films by David Paul Baird, Fr. Michael Ward, and Andrew P…

This is the first episode of a series covering the complete filmography of Terrence Malick, who is arguably both the most important Christian filmmaker working today and the most important filmmaker working today, period. What sets Malick apart from a number of other directors whose work deals with a religious search, is that his films are not just…

DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newslettersAutor: Thomas V. Mirus, James T. Majewski

Katy Carl, fiction writer and editor-in-chief of Dappled Things, joins the show to discuss the 1979 film adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood, directed by John Huston and starring Brad Dourif. Links Katy's short story collection, Fragile Objects https://www.wisebloodbooks.com/store/p136/Fragile_Objects%3A_Short_Stories_by_Katy_Carl.ht…

Introducing a director you almost certainly haven't heard of - but who is well worth getting to know. Lijo Jose Pellissery is one of the major artists of a new movement that has developed over the last decade in the Malayalam film industry - that is, the cinema made in Kerala, the region where India's Christians have lived for many centuries. All o…

The Age of Innocence may come as a surprise to those who associate Martin Scorsese with movies about gangsters. Based on Edith Wharton's novel, it's a sumptuous period romance set in late-19th-century Manhattan high society. Intriguingly, Scorsese described it as his "most violent film", though not so much as a punch is thrown: the violence portray…

Today it's taken for granted that we as Christians are called to "engage the culture" in order to evangelize. Often "engaging the culture" means paying an inordinate amount of attention to popular commercial entertainment in order to show unbelievers how hip we are, straining to find a "Christ-figure" in every comic book movie, and making worship m…

Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is one of those works of art whose reputation has suffered from its circumstances. Its release in late 2006, two years after The Passion and six month after Gibson's infamous DUI, more or less coincided with the director's blacklisting from Hollywood. Thus Apocalypto tends to be overlooked by critics, despite having been hai…

0:00 The prosecution 39:15 The defense With the release of his new film Asteroid City and with memes imitating his cinematic style going viral on social media, Wes Anderson is having a real moment in the zeitgeist almost thirty years into his career. In Asteroid City, Anderson drives further into the immediately identifiable and somewhat polarizing…

Jim Caviezel’s latest project, The Sound of Freedom, is a harrowing but thrilling look at the fight against the global sex trafficking of children. Caviezel's intense but nuanced performance plays well into both the serious subject matter and the film's mainstream appeal. The film's spiritual relevance is increased by the choice to include not only…

Since we started Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast in May 2020, we've been hosting in-depth discussions of movies from the Vatican's 1995 list of important films. Now, after three years, we've finished discussing all 45 films - and in this episode, together with Catholic filmmaker Nathan Douglas, we're taking a look back at the list as a whole. A…

The new film Padre Pio, directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Shia LaBeouf, is ruined by a pornographic and sacrilegious scene involving abuse of a sacred image. James Majewski and Thomas Mirus contend that conscientious Catholics must not see this movie. They explain the difference between portraying an act and committing that act, and how that li…

In this livestream, James Majewski and Thomas Mirus we discussed errors artists can fall into in pushing back against a moralistic approach to art found within the Church. Rather than reacting away from rigidity to excessive openness, the mature Catholic artist has to get over himself and be a servant. Also discussed: The relation between order and…

After three years discussing the Vatican’s 1995 list of 45 important films, Thomas and James have finally reached the final movie! Made in 1927, it’s a five-and-a-half-hour long, epic, technically dazzling silent film about Napoleon. Napoleon trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6504eRh5h6M This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If…

We'll be doing YouTube livestreams on the next 3 Monday evenings, as part of CatholicCulture.org's May fundraising campaign. In these freewheeling conversations, you'll have the opportunity to ask questions and prompt discussion in the live chat box! 5/8, 8pm ET - Mike Aquilina (host, Way of the Fathers podcast) 5/15, 8pm ET - Thomas Mirus & James …

The Miracle Maker, a little-known animated Gospel film with Ralph Fiennes as the voice of Jesus, deserves a place in any Christian family's Easter viewing. Its beautifully crafted mix of stop-motion and traditional 2D animation engages the imagination without dominating it in a way that live-action cinema can't. It's also a masterful piece of adapt…

Filmed in Rome just after its liberation from the Nazis, while the rest of Italy was still at war, Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City documents a unique moment in the history of the Eternal City. With its story of working-class Italians secretly resisting Nazi occupiers, Open City did much to dispose Americans more kindly toward a defeated Italy,…

Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List - which was included on the Vatican's 1995 list of important films - is generally acclaimed as a masterpiece, yet some critics have called it a Hollywood falsification of its subject matter, either because it does not sufficiently show the brutality of the Holocaust, because the story is told from the point of vi…

It’s time for another lively discussion of the wildly popular Christian TV series The Chosen, following on the release of its third season, which stretches from the sermon on the mount to the feeding of the five thousand. Since the show is written by Evangelical Protestants, Thomas and James make a point of keeping an eye out for any doctrinal erro…

Earlier on this podcast was discussed Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc. Another of Dreyer's films was also included on the Vatican film list, this one from the sound era: Ordet (The Word), based on a play by the Lutheran priest Kaj Munk, who was later martyred by the Gestapo. The film centers on the Borgen family…

The Leopard was one of the most popular Italian novels of the 20th century. An historical epic about a Sicilian prince who must navigate the social upheaval that came with Italy's unification in the mid-19th century, it was written by a man who was in a position to know about fading aristocracy - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was a Sicilian aristocr…

Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice, is a deeply personal work, made while the director was dying of cancer. It deals, in Tarkovsky’s words, with "the theme of harmony which is born only of sacrifice, the twofold dependence of love. It's not a question of mutual love: what nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that…

Animation director Timothy Reckart (The Star) joins Criteria to discuss his theory that the greatest action movie of recent years, Mad Max: Fury Road, is best viewed in light of Pope St. John Paul II's theology of the body. Themes of the discussion include: The film's depiction of a society based on use of persons as objects How the story reverses …

The Tree of Wooden Clogs, by Catholic director Ermanno Olmi, depicts a year in the life of four peasant families living on a tenant farmhouse in late 19th century Lombardy. The actors are non-professionals, real local peasants speaking their Bergamasque dialect, recreating their normal life on camera (even if in the trappings of a century earlier).…

For decades critics said Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane was the greatest film ever made. Unfortunately, that intimidating label sometimes keeps people from sitting down and watching the thing. It needn’t be so. Kane is eminently watchable and entertaining. It also definitely isn’t the greatest film of all time, but it’s one of the most technically imp…

James and Thomas wrap up their series of episodes on film noir with a discussion of Billy Wilder's acerbic and vastly entertaining critique of Hollywood avarice and vanity, Sunset Boulevard. The movie business from the beginning has created some sad and grotesque figures, and this film focuses on two in particular. One is the sad and deluded has-be…

There are two movies about St. Francis of Assisi on the Vatican's 1995 list of important films. The first, discussed in the previous episode, is Rossellini's well-known Flowers of St. Francis (1950). The second is quite obscure: Liliana Cavani's Francesco (1989), starring Mickey Rourke as St. Francis and Helena Bonham-Carter as St. Clare. The best …

The great Italian director Roberto Rossellini made what is generally regarded as the best movie about St. Francis of Assisi. Its original Italian title is Francesco, giullare di Dio ("Francis, God's jester"), but in English it is known as The Flowers of St. Francis - the film being based on a 14th-century Italian novel with the same title. As the I…

Continuing through the Vatican's 1995 list of important films, in the section of Art we find the universally beloved 1939 musical The Wizard of Oz. The film is undeniably delightful and magical, but suffers from the attempt to provide a moral of dubious coherence. The film is about a band of characters seeking various virtues, but at the end we are…

Thomas Mirus, James Majewski, and Nathan Douglas discuss the new Amazon series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The show thus far is not so much offensive as it is bland in ways similar to much popular film and television today. This discussion attempts to understand why the show generally fails to move, focusing especially on its freque…

Catholic art historian Elizabeth Lev returns to Criteria to discuss two films about Michelangelo. The Agony and The Ecstasy (1965), directed by Carol Reed and starring Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II, is what Italians call an "Americanata" - an unapologetically bombastic, colorful Hollywood transformation of Itali…

In his book on film noir, Arts of Darkness, Catholic philosopher Thomas Hibbs writes: "Subverting the rationality of the pursuit of happiness, noir turns the American dream into a nightmare. Noir also undercuts the Enlightenment vision of the city as the locus of human bliss, wherein human autonomy and rational economics could combine to bring abou…

Bicycle Thieves, the most beloved classic of Italian neo-realist cinema, would be too easily explained as depicting the crushing pressures of poverty and societal dysfunction in Rome immediately following World War II. But the film transcends any sociological analysis: it has something spiritual to say about how those in poverty can respond to thei…

On the morning of January 15, 1944, Nazis raided a boarding school for boys in Avon, France. The Carmelite monks who ran the school had been hiding some Jewish boys there under false names. As a number of the children and teachers watched, three of their classmates were led away by the Nazis, along with the headmaster, Pere Jacques, who turned back…

James and Thomas introduce one of the most influential genres of Hollywood’s golden age: film noir. Noir’s distinctively moody chiaroscuro look, suspense-laden plotting, and clever, “hard-boiled” dialogue deriving from popular crime fiction make it a most entertaining style. But why did a genre exploring the cynical, seedy and criminal side of Amer…

James and Thomas attempt to discuss the 1933 film adaptation of Little Women, without the help of a female guest. The film, directed by George Cukor and starring Katharine Hepburn as Jo March, was included on the Vatican’s 1995 list of important films, in the category of Art. Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://th…

A mere eight years after the 1920 canonization of Joan of Arc, and in the midst of her great popularity as a French national hero, Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer made The Passion of Joan of Arc. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time, and is included on the Vatican film list. Two aspects in particular put this film in the c…

Novelist and critic Trevor Cribben Merrill joins the podcast to discuss one of his favorite recent films, the Coen brothers' Hail, Caesar! This is one of the Coens' most warm-hearted films, and certainly their most Catholic one. It deals with the problem of vocation and the spiritual value of art, although intriguingly, from the point of view of a …

The Vatican film list includes a few different World War II-related films, and Kon Ichikawa's 1956 classic The Burmese Harp may be one of the most unusual, as the story is told from the perspective of a Japanese troop in Burma in the days after the end of the war. Mizushima, the protagonist, serves in a company whose musically trained captain teach…

James and Thomas continue their discussion of the Vatican film list with Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece Modern Times, included on the list in the category of Art. Released in 1936, Modern Times is both Chaplin's last silent film and his first talkie - his character, the Little Tramp, is silent and the only time we hear people talking is when their v…

The new film Father Stu is based on the true story of Stuart Long, a rough-around-the-edges boxer-turned-priest who died in 2014. Mark Wahlberg plays Fr. Stu in an Oscar-worthy performance, and Mel Gibson makes another entry in long list of broken father roles he has played in recent years. James and Thomas review the film, discussing the pros and …

Poet, translator and cultural commentator Anthony Esolen joins James and Thomas to discuss one of his favorite filmmakers in the genre of "screwball comedy", Preston Sturges. Sturges wrote and directed eight films between 1940 and 1945, seven of which are regarded as classics. This episode focuses on two of those films: Sullivan's Travels (1941) an…

James and Thomas interview Yelena Popovic, writer and director of the new film Man of God, about the Greek Orthodox saint Nektarios of Aegina. Man of God will be in select theaters in the U.S. on March 21 and 28. At 17, Yelena left Belgrade, Yugoslavia to escape civil war. She went to Italy and then the US, working as a model in New York City, and …