The Tree of Life may well be the greatest movie ever made. Heavily inspired by the book of Job and St. Augustine's Confessions (and even including some lines about nature and grace seemingly derived from The Imitation of Christ), director Terrence Malick gives profound spiritual and cosmic scope to the story of an ordinary family in 1950s Texas. The film begins with the death of a son, detours to the creation of the universe, and then flashes back to a richly observed sequence of childhood in all its beauty along with the tragic effects of sin - seen through the memory of a present-day narrator seeking the traces of God in his past. The greatness of The Tree of Life lies in its unmatched poetic power. Unless you've seen another Terrence Malick film, it will be unlike anything you've seen before. Though it has a story, it is less focused on plot development than on an archetypal yet vivid picture of family life and how we gain, lose, and recover our awareness of "love smiling through all things". The film does not follow typical rules of chronological or visual continuity (one could say it is almost entirely montage), but its improvisational freedom and fluidity in acting, cinematography, and editing make for a kinetic and exhilarating viewing experience. The portrayal of childhood is surely the most beautiful ever put on screen. Nathan Douglas joins as guest host in this continuation of our series covering Malick's filmography. SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE to keep this podcast going: https://www.catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

The Sound of Music is rightly beloved by Catholics. James and Thomas discuss the movie's all-around excellence, break down Julie Andrews's virtuosic performance, and explore what the film says about the freedom and openness necessary to discern and pursue one's vocation in life. DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

The Chosen has now passed the halfway point of its seven seasons. Four seasons in, it is possible to take a big-picture look at the show’s trajectory. Season four takes us from the execution of John the Baptist to the raising of Lazarus, ending on the verge of Holy Week with the apostles preparing for Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Biblical threads throughout the season include the falling away of Judas, and Jesus’ sorrow and frustration at his disciples’ inability to hear His predictions of His imminent death. This season still has some of the great moments that have made The Chosen worthwhile, and these scenes are highlighted in the discussion. Jonathan Roumie's performance as Jesus remains the show's greatest strength. Unfortunately, though, the show’s weaknesses have begun to get out of hand, to the point where even its otherwise great moments are significantly undermined. The first major issue is with the creativity of the writers. At its best, the show has shed new light on moments from the Gospel by noticing small details of Scripture and fleshing them out. Invented backstories for the Apostles served to support and color the Biblical account. But in season four, the writers seem to be caught up in their own story ideas, so that even the Gospel moments are overshadowed by wholesale invention. Instead of enhancing the viewer’s understanding of Scripture, the show increasingly interprets the Gospel events through the lens of fictional subplots, in a way that is necessarily reductive, necessarily less interesting, and often clumsily executed. One particular fictional plotline is so badly conceived and so distracting from the Gospel that much of season four is genuinely hard to watch. Another thing consistently undermining the show’s strengths is its busyness, and in particular its tendency to overexplain Jesus’ words from Scripture rather than letting them resonate. This problem is not new, but it stands out all the more in a weak season. Br. Joshua Vargas and Nathan Douglas join James and Thomas for a deep and entertaining discussion of these and many other aspects of the show. Links Thomas's essay on Angel Studios https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/angel-studios-hype/ Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

Thomas Mirus and Nathan Douglas's mini-series on magisterial documents about cinema comes to a close with an episode covering the Vatican II era - specifically between 1963 and 1995, spanning the pontificates of Pope St. Paul VI and Pope St. John Paul II. This was, frankly, an era of decline in terms of official Church engagement with cinema. Where previous pontificates had dealt with film as a unique artistic medium, Vatican II's decree Inter Mirifica set the template for lumping all modern mass media together under the label of "social communications" - discussing them as new technology and social phenomena rather than as individual arts. That said, even if it leaves something to be desired artistically, boiling everything down to "communication" does result in some valuable insights. And every once in a while in this era, a pope would deliver a World Communications Day message specifically about cinema. Important themes in the documents from this time include: -Artists should strive for the heights, not surrender to the commercial lowest common denominator -Communication as self-gift -Film as medium of cultural exchange -JPII: “The mass media…always return to a particular concept of man; and it is precisely on the basis of the exactness and completeness of this concept that they will be judged.” -The necessity to train children in media literacy so they can properly interpret, not be manipulated by, images and symbols -The role of critics Documents discussed in this episode:  Vatican II, Inter Mirifica (1963) https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19631204_inter-mirifica_en.html Address of Pope Paul VI to artists (closing address of Vatican II, 1965) https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/speeches/1965/documents/hf_p-vi_spe_19651208_epilogo-concilio-artisti.html Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Communio et Progressio (1971) https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/pccs/documents/rc_pc_pccs_doc_23051971_communio_en.html Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Aetatis Novae (1992) https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/pccs/documents/rc_pc_pccs_doc_22021992_aetatis_en.html Pope Paul VI, First World Communications Day address (1967) https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/messages/communications/documents/hf_p-vi_mes_19670507_i-com-day.html Pope John Paul II, 1984 World Communications Day address https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/communications/documents/hf_jp-ii_mes_24051984_world-communications-day.html Pope John Paul II, 1995 World Communications Day address on cinema https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/communications/documents/hf_jp-ii_mes_06011995_world-communications-day.html SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE to keep this podcast going: https://www.catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

The 1991 film A Brighter Summer Day, directed by Edward Yang, is considered by many one of the best movies ever made. The film is set in Taiwan, shortly after the Chinese Civil War, when the country was under martial law, with a political and cultural pressure felt at every level of society. At the center of this intricately plotted four-hour drama is the family of fourteen-year-old Xiao Si'r, whose strong sense of honor and justice is pulled in various directions as he gets caught up in a youth gang and romantically entangled with the girlfriend of a disappeared gang leader. But more than that, this incredibly textured four-hour drama gives the sense of a whole uneasy social fabric. As this is the first Chinese-language film the Criteria hosts have covered, they are joined by film festival programmer Frank Yan, who provides crucial historical and cultural context about Taiwanese history and cinema. SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

Thomas Mirus and Nathan Douglas continue their discussion of Pope Pius XII’s apostolic exhortations brought together in the 1955 document “The Ideal Film”, which remains the high water-mark of official Church engagement with the art form. They also touch on his 1957 encyclical Miranda prorsus, on radio, films, and television. In the first audience, Pius XII had discussed the ideal film in its relation to the spectator. In this second audience, he discusses the ideal film both in relation to its content, and in relation to society. He makes general observations on the legitimate range of subjects which a film may take on as matter for its plot, and offers principles for films which deal with religious subjects and for the portrayal of evil. Pius XII puts his finger on one of the biggest problems with many Christian movies: “Religious interpretation, even when it is carried out with a right intention, rarely receives the stamp of an experience truly lived and as a result, capable of being shared with the spectator.” Two years after The Ideal Film, the encyclical Miranda prorsus (on radio, films, and television) reiterated much of the moral teaching of Pius XI’s Vigilanti cura, but with more detail for particular occupations within the film world—directors, producers, actors, theater owners, etc. Of particular interest is the teaching about the moral obligations of Catholic film critics. Links Pope Pius XII, Apostolic Exhortations on The Ideal Film https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_p-xii_exh_25101955_ideal-film.html Pope Pius XII, Miranda Prorsus https://www.vatican.va/content/pius- SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE to keep this podcast going: https://www.catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

Continuing their survey of magisterial documents on cinema, Thomas Mirus and Nathan Douglas arrive at Pope Ven. Pius XII's two apostolic exhortations gathered under the title "The Ideal Film". Pius shows himself to be a true enthusiast of cinema with his poetic insights. "The Ideal Film" remains the high water-mark of official Church engagement with the art form. This episode covers the first of the two exhortations. Pius begins with an insightful discussion of the psychological effects of film on the viewer, not only insofar as the viewer is passive, but insofar as the viewer is invited to actively identify himself with the human figures on the screen and even, in some sense, participate in the creation of the events, by interpreting them for himself. He then begins his discussion of the ideal film, first in its relation to the spectator. In this relation, the ideal film will offer the following: respect for man, loving understanding, the fulfillment of promises made by the film and even of the inner longings brought by the viewer, and aiding man in his self-expression in the path of right and goodness. There is also a fascinating sidebar on the issue of whether it is legitimate for some films, even ideal films, to function as pure entertainment and escapism – to which Pius answers yes, for “man has shallows as well as depths”. Pope Pius XII, Apostolic Exhortations on The Ideal Film https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_p-xii_exh_25101955_ideal-film.html SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE to keep this podcast going: https://www.catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

In 1936, Pope Pius XI published his encyclical on the motion picture, Vigilanti cura. The encyclical deals with the grave moral concerns raised by the cinema, which had by then become a ubiquitous social influence (though it was also a still-evolving medium, as the transition from silent film to talkies had only recently been completed). Pius holds up for worldwide emulation the initiative that had recently taken by the American bishops to influence the motion picture industry in a moral direction, as well as to protect their own flocks from immoral movies. Vigilanti cura was ghostwritten by the American Jesuit Fr. Daniel Lord, a prolific pamphleteer involved with Catholic Action. Fr. Lord had written the original draft of the Motion Picture Production Code, and helped to found the Legion of Decency. He had also worked in Hollywood as a consultant on Cecil B. DeMille's silent Biblical picture, The King of Kings. This is the first of three episodes in which Thomas Mirus and Nathan Douglas survey the body of magisterial documents related to cinema, and discuss what we can take from these teachings today. Links Vigilanti cura https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_29061936_vigilanti-cura.html SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE to keep this podcast going: https://www.catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

Joshua Hren, editor-in-chief of Wiseblood Books, joins the podcast to review Wildcat, the new Flannery O'Connor biopic directed by Ethan Hawke and starring Maya Hawke and Laura Linney. The film is a respectful and nuanced portrayal of O'Connor and her faith, accomplished by extensive quotation from her prayer journal and letters, as well as several interludes depicting her short stories (which keeps the film from feeling like a formulaic biopic). Wildcat's portrayal of the relationship between artistic ambition and faith is deeply relevant to Catholic artists. It should inspire them to find creative ways of dealing with the pressures that would subvert their God-given gifts, whether those pressures come from other Catholics, family, or the art world. Links List of places where you can see Wildcat (scroll down) https://wildcat.oscilloscope.net/ Wiseblood Books https://www.wisebloodbooks.com/ Catholic MFA program at the University of St. Thomas https://www.stthom.edu/Academics/School-of-Arts-and-Sciences/Division-of-Liberal-Studies/Graduate/Master-of-Fine-Arts-in-Creative-Writing DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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, Malick's retelling of the story remarkably combines realism and historical accuracy with poetry and romance, as all three protagonists explore not just one but multiple new worlds, geographical and interior. With The New World, Malick definitively entered a new stage in his career, particularly in his unforgettable collaboration with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. The result is an aesthetic that is humble and receptive rather than magisterial. Rather than dominating reality, the camera seems to enter into it, so that we can contemplate something the camera cannot exhaust. James, Thomas, and Nathan discuss Malick's style extensively in this episode, and make the case for why Catholics studying or making art should not focus only on "themes" to the neglect of form, because style itself conveys a vision of reality. Note: make sure you watch the extended cut or the 150-minute "first cut", not the theatrical cut. This film contains brief ethnographic nudity. DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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 compelling response to each of her critiques of Catholicism. Barny starts to see Fr. Morin regularly for a mix of intellectual tête-à-tête and spiritual counsel, and is gradually drawn back to the Church—but mixed in with her spiritual attraction to the Church is a romantic attraction to the man. This, combined with subplots about the experience of wartime France, is the premise of the 1961 film Léon Morin, Priest, and it may on first summary sound like the sort of sensational and irreverent story no Catholic wants to touch with a ten-foot pole. But Fr. Morin does not break his vows. Instead, this is one of the best priest movies ever made, a realistic, tasteful (and not excessively cringe-inducing) treatment of a real problem that arises in priestly life. From the priest’s point of view, it’s a thought-provoking study of pastoral prudence; from the female protagonist’s point of view, it deals with the necessity of gradually purifying one’s motives in the course of conversion SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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 (1952) is a (perhaps more honest) self-examination of Hollywood itself. The latter contains the more perceptive observations of artistic genius and its operations, which tend to subordinate everything to the work to be done. More broadly, it's a study of leadership, in both its positive and its more self-serving forms. SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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 experiences of U.S. soldiers during the battle for Guadalcanal during World War II, The Thin Red Line is remarkable in that it features all the poetry, interiority, and dreamy aesthetics we have come to expect from Malick, while still being, in Nathan Douglas's words, "a fully functioning war movie" - conveying the physical chaos as well as the psychological sufferings and moral challenges of war - challenges of leadership, sacrifice, compassion for one's enemies, and how to meet one's death with calm and dignity. The Thin Red Line is arguably Malick's first masterpiece - and his first film focused on metaphysical themes, or as James Majewski says, a "preamble" to the more explicit Christian faith found in his later work, using voiceover extensively to ask questions about the origins of good and evil, the unity of human experience, and most of all, how one can maintain faith in the transcendent in the midst of evil, ugliness and disorder. SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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 Abbas Kiarostami, who came up with an approach to filmmaking that is not just different from Hollywood, but different from anyone else in world cinema. Kiarostami spent the first two decades of his career working for the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Tehran, making a plethora of fascinating movies either for or about children (fiction, documentary, and educational). In addition to exploring his concerns with childhood and education, he developed a great ability to direct non-professional actors and this allowed him to blur the line between documentary and fiction in his later films - or, perhaps, just to be honest about how human behavior is affected by the presence of a camera, even in a documentary setting. If you only watch one of the films discussed in this episode, you might pick his 1987 feature Where Is the Friend’s Home?, an beautifully simple story about childhood, friendship and conscience. Through its patient attention to detail, this film allows us to rediscover a child’s-eye perspective on the world. Where Is the Friend’s Home? is the first in a sort of trilogy of films Kiarostami shot in the region of Koker in northern Iran. That first installment, while one of his best works, is not actually typical of the unique style he developed soon after, which can be seen even within the trilogy itself. The simplicity of the first story is succeeded by two films that take on multiple perspectives and blur the line between fiction and real life. In a word, things get meta. In the second film, …And Life Goes On, the director of the first film (played by an actor, not the real director) and his young son search for the two boys who acted in the first film, after the Koker region was devastated by a real-life earthquake that killed 50,000 people. Investigating real-life events through a fictional road trip, we get a new perspective on the simple fictional perspective of the first movie. The third film, Through the Olive Trees, gets very complex (but in a most entertaining way). While shooting a scene in the second film, Kiarostami noticed some tension between the two young actors playing a married couple. So he invented a love story about these two actors, and the third film is about this story that takes place while that scene from the second film was being shot. Shot, we should add, by a director who is directing scenes involving the character of the “director” from the 2nd film – so we have two different actors playing directors, both of which represent the real director, Kiarostami. As avant-garde as this sounds, it’s a highly entertaining story that never could have been done as well by a director hewing to commercial instincts. SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

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 but the psychological and spiritual fallout of a culture that produced the kamikaze phenomenon. The film confronts the culture of death that dominated WWII-era Japan and its corruption of the idea of self-sacrifice, and shows how our sacrifices in war should be rightly ordered to preserving the value of human life rather than seeking a heroic death for its own sake. Visual artist Erin McAtee, co-founder of the Catholic arts organization Arthouse2B, joins to discuss the themes of the film as well as the director’s choice to produce a black-and-white version. 00:00 Intro 06:15 Black-and-white version 14:18 Story and themes  Links Godsplaining episode featuring James Majewski and Erin McAtee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kimE7ob1QKY&ab_channel=Godsplaining%7CCatholicPodcast Erin K. McAtee https://www.erinkmcatee.com/ Arthouse2B https://www.arthouse2b.org/ SUBSCRIBE to Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/criteria-the-catholic-film-podcast/id1511359063 SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters  DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

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 to Japanese culture. The film holds a mirror up to both parents and children, and if it is critical of those who fail to honor and love their elderly parents, it also shows that this is often a result of the parents having failed their children when they were younger. Tokyo Story should provoke an examination of conscience in viewers of every generation. Irish Catholic multimedia commentator Ruadhan Jones returns to the podcast to discuss this canonical work of Japanese cinema. Links Ruadhan Jones links https://linktr.ee/ruadhanjones SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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 Petiprin. The three authors join the show to compares notes with James and Thomas about their overall evaluations of the list, great religious films made by non-religious directors, what makes a good saint movie, and their personal favorite items on the Vatican Film List. Links Popcorn with the Pope: A Guide to the Vatican Film List https://bookstore.wordonfire.org/products/popcorn-with-the-pope Buy it on Kindle https://www.amazon.com/Popcorn-Pope-Guide-Vatican-Film-ebook/dp/B0CP6H5KV3/ SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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 about searching indefinitely with no answer, but they come from the perspective of a sincere believer who actually has a positive proposal about life's meaning. Some of his best-known movies in which this positive proposal is evident are A Hidden Life, The Tree of Life, and The Thin Red Line. But we are starting from the beginning, with Malick's first two films, Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). In these two films we already see Malick's personality on display: his gorgeous visual style with a heavy focus on the beauty of the natural world, his use of voiceover narration and classical music, his improvisational approach, and the impressionistic rather than plot-driven nature of much of his work. His philosophical interests (Malick spent time as a philosophy professor and even translated a work by Heidegger) are also evident in both films but the second feature, Days of Heaven, is the first to introduce the extensive Scriptural references featured in all of his films since. James and Thomas are joined by Catholic filmmaker and critic Nathan Douglas for this series. 0:00 Introduction to Terrence Malick 32:10 Badlands 1:08:54 Days of Heaven Nathan Douglas's website https://nwdouglas.com/about SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletter DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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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.html Dappled Things https://www.dappledthings.org/ SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE at http://www.catholicculture.org/donate/audio

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 of Pellissery's films are set within Indian Catholic or Orthodox communities. Indeed, while the director is clearly influenced by Western movies, much of his films' vitality comes from how regionally rooted they are, not just in Kerala but even in specific cities and villages. Pellissery's films show a remarkable level of craft, artistry and experimentation considering their mainstream success in India - indeed, as James Majewski says by contrast with contemporary Hollywood, this seems to be what an "alive film culture" looks like. Within the Malayalam film industry, Pellissery is known as the "Master of Chaos", presumably due to the spontaneous feeling of his scenes, often featuring large, rambunctious crowds, and perhaps also the way situations in his stories tend to spiral out of control. His films keep you riveted in a way that is not manipulative, and they are unpredictable without being dependent on contrived twists. James and Thomas feature three of Pellissery's films in this discussion, in order to explore his diversity of genre: Jallikattu is an off-the-wall action movie about villagers trying to chase down an escaped bull - framed within quotations from the book of Revelation which seem to indicate that the bull represents Satan. Ee.Ma.Yau (which means "Jesus, Mary, Joseph")) is about a son struggling to provide a good funeral for his father, but constantly being frustrated by his own limits. Pellissery's most recent film, Like an Afternoon Dream, is a slow, surreal drama - arguably a ghost story - about a man who suddenly takes on another man's identity. Here are links to view the films in their original Malayalam language with English subtitles: Jallikattu https://www.amazon.com/Jallikattu-Antony-Varghese/dp/B07ZQMQ9TT Ee.Ma.Yau https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZNDgzLsPZ8&ab_channel=OPMRecords Like an Afternoon Dream https://www.netflix.com/title/81676305 This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org  Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com  

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 portrayed is interior and social, not physical, in this depiction of a romance thwarted by the constricting social norms of the upper class. Scorsese faced the challenge of depicting a society in which, as the narrator puts it, "the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs" - and so the director cannot rely on characters stating things outright. His great accomplishment is that the film nonetheless reaches an operatic pitch of emotion, keeping the viewer on seat-edge. This is done not only through outstanding performances (Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder), but also by camera movements conveying repressed passion, by light and color, and by the gorgeous Elmer Bernstein score. For all that, if the film merely depicted the cruelty of social norms and mores stifling forbidden love, it would be of limited interest. Yet as the story develops, it doesn't allow itself to be reduced to a critique of the past. Indeed, though not without ambiguity, it shows the value of strong social rules and institutions - because often, if we follow our passion, we destroy ourselves and others. Donate to make these shows possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org

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 music as repetitive, melodically banal, and emotionalistic as possible. Past a certain point, "cultural engagement" begins to seem like a noble-sounding excuse to enjoy mediocrity - and Christians, unfortunately, are as much in love with mediocre entertainment as anyone else. The novel doctrine of "cultural engagement" is just one subject covered in Joshua Gibbs's challenging and entertaining new book, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity. Joshua joins Thomas Mirus for a wide-ranging conversation about how we choose to spend our free time and why it matters. Topics include: The dangers of artistic mediocrity The importance of boredom Why streaming has been terrible for music The different kinds of Christian "cultural engagers" Uncommon and common good things and how both are threatened by the mediocre How the "special" apes the holy The meme-ification of art Links Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity https://circeinstitute.org/product/love-what-lasts/ Gibbs, "Film As a Metaphysical Coup" https://circeinstitute.org/blog/film-metaphysical-coup/ Thomas's favorite episode of Gibbs's podcast, Proverbial https://shows.acast.com/proverbial/episodes/how-to-buy-a-bottle-of-wine www.GibbsClassical.com SUBSCRIBE to the Catholic Culture Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-catholic-culture-podcast/id1377089807 DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org

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 hailed as a masterpiece by the likes of Scorsese, Tarantino, Edgar Wright, and Spike Lee. Apocalypto has also been attacked for its portrayal of "first peoples". Set in Mesoamerica immediately before first contact with the Spanish, it features a protagonist from a small forest tribe who is captured by Mayans for the purpose of human sacrifice (depicted as the mass-scale brutality it was) and must try to escape back to his family.  Gibson's depiction of Mesoamerican peoples is sensitive and sympathetic but not PC. Rather than sneering at how terrible a pre-Columbian civilization could be, in portraying the Mayans Gibson wanted to make us reflect on the decadence of the modern West and in particular the American Empire. The film is about a culture of death not unlike our own. Filmed, like The Passion, in a language most people have never heard, Apocalypto is a stunningly ambitious recreation of a lost civilization, but also a thoroughly entertaining chase movie. Gibson is known for his singular approach to cinematic violence, and Apocalypto gives ample opportunity to discuss the specific artistic choices that are overlooked when we wave off all movie "blood and guts" as the same. Links Essay by the film's historical consultant https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288187016_Relativism_Revisionism_Aboriginalism_and_EmicEtic_Truth_The_Case_Study_of_Apocalypto DONATE to make these shows possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org

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 style he has cultivated for the past decade, characterized by meticulous framing, camera moves and blocking, a certain color palette, and deadpan writing and acting. One is always aware of the director's hand tightly controlling a cute, harmonious little world of his own creation. The Criteria hosts look at Anderson's career and try to figure out what he's trying to achieve by making his movies so aggressively, well, Anderson-y. James Majewski calls it downright decadent and pretentious, style for its own sake to the point of self-parody. Thomas Mirus is concerned that the increasingly airless and emotionally closed-down aesthetic may be a reflection of Anderson's belief that life has no discernible meaning, and so there is nothing much to do other than create aesthetic illusions (an idea explicitly alluded to in more than one of his films). Nathan Douglas defends Anderson's style as sincere, in service to something more than shallow visual pleasure. But we all agree on one thing: Wes Anderson is in despair. DONATE to make these shows possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org

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 protective fathers, but a repentant exploiter among its protagonists.  Though the film isn't about Hollywood, one of its best scenes offers what may as well be a portrayal of how the entertainment and modeling industries sexualize children. The impact is all the more unsettling for how subtly and tastefully the scene is handled. Though they praise the film, Thomas and James express some reservations about the “you must see this movie for the cause” style of promotion.

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. After discussing how and why the Vatican film list (actually titled "Some Important Films") was made, and putting it in the context of several decades of concern from the highest levels of the Vatican about the social and moral influence of cinema, we talk about our favorite and least favorite films on the Vatican's list, as well as the movies we think should be added in a hypothetical future update of the list. Ultimately, watching through the entire Vatican film list is not only an education in the classics of world cinema, but also gives  important perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of past cinematic engagement with religion, allowing us to see both the potential fruit that could be borne and the dead ends that should be avoided in the Catholic cinema of the future. 0:00 Introduction 11:31 History behind the Vatican film list 43:34 What films should be removed from the list? 1:24:10 Our favorite films on the list 1:55:30 What films should have been included that weren't? 2:34:09 What post-1995 films would we add? 3:00:19 The most Catholic/edifying films on the list Links Pope St. John Paul II's address on the 100th birthday of cinema https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/1995/march/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19950317_plen-pccs.html "100 Years of Cinema" document from the Pontifical Council of Social Communications with model curriculum https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/pccs/documents/rc_pc_pccs_doc_19960101_100-cinema_en.html Below is the 1995 list by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, "Some Important Films" (with links to our episode on each film): Religion Andrei Rublev, Andrei Tarkovsky (1969, USSR) The Mission, Roland Joffé (1986, UK) The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl T. Dreyer (1928, France) Vie et passion du Christ (Life and Passion of Christ), Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet (1905, France) The Flowers of St. Francis, Roberto Rossellini (1950, Italy) The Gospel According to Matthew, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1964, France/Italy) Thérèse, Alain Cavalier (1986, France) Ordet (The Word), Carl T. Dreyer (1955, Denmark) The Sacrifice, Andrei Tarkowsky (1986, Sweden/UK/France) Francesco, Liliana Cavani (1989, Italy/Germany) Ben-Hur, William Wyler (1959, USA) Babette’s Feast, Gabriel Axel (1987, Denmark) Nazarín, Luis Buñuel (1958, Mexico) Monsieur Vincent, Maurice Cloche (1947, France) A Man for All Seasons, Fred Zinnemann (1966, UK) Values Gandhi, Richard Attenborough (1982, UK/USA/India) Intolerance, D. W. Griffith (1916, USA) Dekalog (The Decalogue), Krzysztof Kieslowski (1987, Poland) Au Revoir, Les Enfants (Goodbye, Children), Louis Malle (1987, France) Dersu Uzala, Akira Kurosawa (1974, Japan) The Tree of Wooden Clogs, Ermanno Olmi (1978, Italy/France) Rome, Open City, Roberto Rossellini (1946, Italy) Wild Strawberries, Ingmar Bergman (1957, Sweden) The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman (1957, Sweden) Chariots of Fire, Hugh Hudson (1981, UK) Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio de Sica (1948, Italy) It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra (1946, USA) Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg (1993, USA) On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan (1954, USA) The Burmese Harp, Kon Ichikawa (1956, Japan) Art 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick (1968, UK/USA) La Strada, Federico Fellini (1954, Italy) Citizen Kane, Orson Welles (1941, USA) Metropolis, Fritz Lang (1927, Germany) Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin (1936, USA) Napoléon, Abel Gance (1927, Italy) 8½, Federico Fellini (1963, Italy) La Grande Illusion, Jean Renoir (1937, France) Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau (1922, Germany) Stagecoach, John Ford (1939, USA) The Leopard, Luchino Visconti (1963, Italy/France) Fantasia (1940, USA) The Wizard of Oz, Victor Fleming (1939, USA) The Lavender Hill Mob, Charles Crichton (1951, UK) Little Women, George Cukor (1933, USA)

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 line can be obliterated on a film set. They discuss the reality behind holy images, and the importance of making reparation for sacrilege. First Saturdays devotion to make reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary: https://www.bluearmy.com/first-saturday-devotion/ Thomas Mirus wrote a summary of the arguments in this podcast for the Dappled Things blog: https://www.dappledthings.org/deep-down-things/about-that-padre-pio-film This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org

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 surprise in beauty, morality and culture. Note: the video begins abruptly in the middle of our introductory fundraising campaign pitch - because of some glitched-out audio, we cut the first 6 minutes or so. We're a week into CatholicCulture.org's May fundraising campaign. Generous donors have offered a $50,000 matching grant, so any donation you make by May 24 will double in value! You can donate on our website or PayPal (tax-deductible).  Donation links below: http://www.CatholicCulture.org/donate  https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=DZRZRJ5723MLA Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of content, including news, articles, podcasts, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org

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 you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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 Majewski (hosts,Catholic Culture Podcast, Catholic Culture Audiobooks, Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast) 5/22, 8pm ET - Phil Lawler & Jeff Mirus (CatholicCulture.org writers) You can use this link to connect to the Mike Aquilina livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNXvhOJuLZ8 The links to the other two livestreams will go up on the Catholic Culture YouTube channel a few days before each one.

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 adaptation, compressing the story of Christ into 88 minutes. It somehow retains the compactness of the Gospel accounts, yet feels fleshed out by subtle touches and connections within the existing material rather than overmuch invention. For this discussion, Thomas and James are joined by Timothy Reckart (animator and director of the Oscar-nominated stop-motion short Head Over Heels, and of the feature-length Christmas movie The Star). Watch Tim Reckart's short film Head Over Heels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96D-bRx5KuU Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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, and made the cinematic movement of Italian neo-realism internationally famous. Art historian Elizabeth Lev joins the Criteria team to discuss this classic, included on the 1995 Vatican film list under the category of Values.  Catholicism is central to the film, with Aldo Fabrizi playing one of the great heroic movie priests, almost an Italian counterpart to the one in On the Waterfront. But it's also interesting how the film manipulates recent history to serve as a kind of propaganda for Italian unity and the rehabilitation of Italy's global image in the post-fascist period - "art as diplomacy", as Lev calls it. https://www.elizabeth-lev.com/ https://nwdouglas.com/about Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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 view of a German, because it has (in some respects) a happy ending, or because (according to the critique of Shoah director Claude Lanzmann) any fictional portrayal whatsoever of the Holocaust is necessarily a transgression. It is true that while Schindler's List conveys not a little of the horror of the Holocaust, it is also the work of a master entertainer, Steven Spielberg. For a 3 hour, 15 minute drama about genocide, it is remarkably watchable; and indeed, compared with many other movies of the same length, it positively flies by. Shouldn't a film about the Holocaust be a bit more...unbearable? In this discussion of the film, James and Thomas take these questions seriously, while ultimately vindicating Spielberg's work. While there are things a popular Hollywood drama is not going to accomplish, it is legitimate to portray terrible events in a way that is honest and yet does not actually traumatize the viewer. A film that exercises more restraint will perhaps be more successful in carrying on the memory of the dead to future generations than one which is such an unrelenting immersion in evil that few can bear to watch it. Meanwhile, the film, while not being unwatchably brutal, offers a real spiritual challenge to the viewer, one which will especially resonate with those who study to imitate the lives of the saints. Those who object to telling the story from the perspective of a real-life German savior of eleven hundred Jews are missing the point. DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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 errors, and Br. Joshua Vargas joins to share his knowledge of Scripture and ancient Jewish and Christian culture and practices. The good news is that season three (unlike the 2021 Christmas special) is The Chosen’s least doctrinally problematic season yet. By this time the show has hit its stride, having established a consistent set of strengths and weaknesses. The chief strength, as always, is Catholic actor Jonathan Roumie’s performance as Jesus. As Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees becomes more open, we get to see him in a more provocative and even stern mode than before The show’s portrayal of the spiritual value of suffering and the importance of Peter as head of the apostles both tend in a more Catholic direction as well. And its unashamed faith in the supernatural aspects of Jesus’ earthly ministry continues to edify, with the apostles themselves now being given authority to perform signs and wonders. After somewhat holding back their non-doctrinal criticisms while The Chosen got off the ground in its first two seasons, James, Thomas, and Br. Joshua now critique the show’s aesthetic weaknesses, which may be as much a product of today’s pop storytelling as of Evangelical Protestantism. Often this takes the form of “telling” rather than “showing”. The least interesting moments are when character drama takes the form of bickering, in which we are expected to believe the stakes are high despite the apparent pettiness of the conflict. In general, there is a lack of faith in subtext, so that while often the show’s expansion of the terse Gospel accounts is illuminating, at times it actually diminishes their impact, especially when extended fictional backstories are allowed to overwhelm real Gospel moments. There are also moments when the show’s emotional tenor keeps it from portraying large-scale scenes such as the feeding of the five thousand in an appropriately awe-inspiring way. As Br. Joshua puts it, “The show excels much more at making intimate scenes feel epic than at making large scenes feel epic.” Finally, the writing, while good in many ways, frequently resorts to jarringly anachronistic language, at times betraying a lack of sensitivity to how different ways of speaking reveal different ways of thinking. The writers seem to think that while people in the ancient world may have had different opinions from us, their basic emotional experience of reality was the same as ours. It was not. Certain quips put into these first-century characters’ mouths are self-aware and self-referential in a way unmistakably a product of the age of mass entertainment and social media. DONATE at http://www.catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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, land-owning farmers in a small village in Denmark. The patriarch, Morton Borgen, is a religious man, but his oldest son Mikkel has lost his faith, while his second son Johannes, while studying theology, has gone mad and believes he is Jesus Christ Himself. Ordet can be viewed as a provocative critique of a modern Christianity that no longer believes in miracles. Its astonishing conclusion throws down the gauntlet, forcing us to consider what it really means to have faith. This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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 aristocrat and the last Prince of Lampedusa, and his novel was inspired by his great-grandfather. This novel, which paid tribute to the old order while taking a decidedly pessimistic view of liberalism's promise of a new dawn for mankind, was adapted into a classic film starring Burt Lancaster and directed by Luchino Visconti. Though Visconti was a Communist, he was also the descendant of Milanese nobility, and made a film which treats the old nobility with sympathy, yet without rose-colored glasses. The Leopard (1963) was included on the Vatican's 1995 list of great films, under the category of Art. Joining the podcast to discuss this film is David Paul Baird, co-author of a book on the Vatican film list forthcoming from Word on Fire. This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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 no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love." For this reason, perhaps, it was included in the 1995 Vatican film list, in the category of Religion. To put it simply, the film’s protagonist, a middle-aged Swedish man, realizes that he must make a sacrifice to God in order to avert the onset of nuclear war. In its concrete plot, The Sacrifice is rather mysterious and surreal. Yet even if it doesn’t totally work as a literal story, its themes of love, faith, fatherhood, and the dire spiritual situation of modern man are handled economically and intelligibly. Still, guest host Nathan Douglas suggests that The Sacrifice should not be the first film you watch by Tarkovsky—perhaps it should even be saved for last. Letterboxd review mentioned in discussion https://letterboxd.com/kilo_orange/film/the-sacrifice/ Behind-the-scenes footage from the house-burning scene (1:13:39-1:27:00)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Rd6PbSmHM Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org

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 very mechanisms of that use and domination and transforms them into means of self-giving love Storytelling through action rather than dialogue How this apparently feminist film complicates an ideological reading Complementarity rather than enmity between the sexes Note: This discussion contains adult themes. Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio  

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). The result is a stunning vision of a now-bygone culture that grew out of close contact with the land. Though the film is not nostalgic in longing for the good old days, Olmi (himself a son of Lombard peasants) did say, “I firmly believe that peasant culture in the world is, at this moment in the history of humanity, the only ‘culture’ worthy of that name.” This film can be seen as a culmination of the neo-realist movement that had developed decades earlier with films like Bicycle Thieves and Rome, Open City; but Tree of Wooden Clogs is more neo-realist than the neo-realists, with an almost documentary quality and a purer commitment to depicting a way of life rather than a plot. Olmi was not part of the elite, Marxist-dominated establishment of Italian cinema, and Wooden Clogs drew heavy criticism for depicting peasants who did not revolt against their economic situation. In fact, though the film does not shy away from showing that the peasants' relation with their landlord is marked by injustice, it also shows them quite indifferent to the revolutionary goings-on we glimpse at the margins of this film. Olmi instead wanted to “tell history outside the official channels”, and find wisdom in a less "clamorous" history, by listening to the “whisper of the generations”. This "whisper of the generations" very much includes the simple Catholic faith of the peasants. The great beauty amidst hardship is depicted in a most unassuming way, with Olmi allowing reality to unfold itself through contemplation rather than imposing a stylized structure on the film. He described his approach to filmmaking thus: "There is something in reality that is stronger than you. So what are the terms of the conflict? Am I the one who must tame reality? But it’s so good to be tamed by reality. Because it’s always surprising. This also happens with love." The Tree of Wooden Clogs was included in the Vatican's 1995 list of important films under the category of Values. A little later, Ermanno Olmi and his film school were given a papal medal by St. John Paul II. In discussing this film, James and Thomas are joined by film scholar Maria Elena de las Carreras and filmmaker/critic Nathan Douglas. Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

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 impressive, especially considering it was directed, produced, co-written and starred in by a 25-year-old who’d never made a movie before. The titular Charles Foster Kane is a character very recognizable to Americans, the larger-than-life business mogul-turned-celebrity who dabbles in politics. Many details of Kane’s private life are known to the general public, but the film tells us that there’s more to a person than what’s said in the newspapers – perhaps especially when that person was himself a newspaperman who took pride in controlling public perception. Kane’s complicated, puzzle-like story structure suggests that fully boring down into the mystery of a man’s life may be impossible, but also makes us feel that the effort to get beneath the façade is worthwhile. Citizen Kane was included on the Vatican’s 1995 list of important films under the category of Art.

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-been celebrity. Sunset Boulevard gets "meta" in its reflection of the perils of star-worship, especially in the character of Norma Desmond, a former silent film idol played unforgettably by a real-life former silent film star, Gloria Swanson. The other Hollywood type this film shows us is the ambitious loser. Film noir protagonists tend to be losers, and indeed the loser seems like a distinctly American archetype, the flip-side of the American dream with its expectation that one should always be advancing one's station in life. Perhaps no place generates losers like L.A., and in Sunset Boulevard we get our man in down-and-out screenwriter Joe Gillis, played by William Holden. Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

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 thing one can say about Francesco is that despite being directed by an atheist, it attempts to take its protagonist seriously as a saint; that it is somewhat faithful to the historical trajectory of his life; and that it does not embrace the usual reductive cliches about St. Francis. Those qualities alone do not make for an interesting film, however, and Francesco would be a fairly rote biopic were it not for the casting of Mickey Rourke. But this casting choice is more of a curiosity than it is a strength of the film. For all the sincerity of Rourke's performance, the lovable personality of Francis as universally attested by early biographies is almost totally missing. This may be a deliberate artistic choice to strip St. Francis of a "superficial" charisma, in order to draw our attention to a deeper mystery at his core. But how much of the historical personality of Francis can we afford to lose before the exercise becomes fruitless? And speaking of stripping, while it's true that a few famous incidents in St. Francis's life involved nudity, the way these are handled onscreen is far from edifying... In this episode, James Majewski, Thomas Mirus and Nathan Douglas attempt to make sense of the most dubious selection on the Vatican film list. Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

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 Italian title suggests, Rossellini wanted to focus on the whimsical aspects of the saint's personality. He sought to capture “the merrier aspect of the Franciscan experience, on the playfulness, the ‘perfect delight,’ the freedom that the spirit finds in poverty, and in an absolute detachment from material things," all elements he had found in the book on which the film was based. The film faithfully imitates the simple poignant and amusing charm of its source material, right down to its structure as a series of vignettes with no overarching plot. Like the book, it is about St. Francis's followers as much as the saint himself, and particularly focuses on the misadventures of Brother Juniper, as found in the Life of Brother Juniper, a text associated with The Little Flowers of St. Francis. In keeping with Rossellini's prior work as one of the founders of Italian neo-realism, the film uses almost no professional actors: all the Franciscan characters are played by real Franciscan monks. This too contributes to the film's purity and simplicity - an appropriate tribute to St. Francis. The film is one of two about St. Francis that were included on the Vatican's 1995 list of important films. The next episode will be about the other: Liliana Cavani's Francesco (1989). Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

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 aren't quite sure where virtue comes from, and are left with a sense of disillusionment both within Oz (the Wizard being a phony) and with regard to the whole story (having been a dream). Nearly half a century later, Wizard got a sequel in Walter Murch's Return to Oz (1985) - but a sequel in plot terms only, with a very different spirit and style. For one thing, Return is more faithful to its source material in the stories of L. Frank Baum, who was inspired by Lewis Carroll's insistence that children stories don't need a lesson at the end. This approach too has its liabilities, because while a shoehorned theme is bad, so is realizing halfway through a movie that the series of events one has been watching, while charming and inventive, doesn't have much of a point. Return is also significantly scarier than Wizard, as one of a number of whimsical but dark fantasy films made in the mid-80s (alongside Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal). The films can also be contrasted in their visual concepts, each compelling in its own way. Where Wizard opts for overtly artificial yet delightful sets, Return offers a more fully realized world, appropriately since the film rejects the idea that Oz is a dream. Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

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 frequent small-mindedness or arbitrariness in characterization and writing, and on its habit of “telegraphing” or signalling emotion rather than genuinely conveying it. (We apologize for the lip-syncing problems in this episode!) Topics and timestamps: 0:00 Introduction 3:27 The “Game-of-Thronesification” of character motivation 9:34 Galadriel, Valinor, and the elves’ artistic motivations 18:01 A graceless Galadriel and small-minded writing 29:02 Contrasting performances: Galadriel vs. Elrond 35:21 Failure to trust that virtue is interesting 37:59 “IT’S A SNOW TROOOOOOLL!” The “John-Wickification” of action 41:00 Generic tough girl face; telegraphing emotion rather than living it 52:44 Arbitrary conflict and fussy dwarves 59:06 Starting at level 1: the “video-gamification” of character development 1:06:00 Too much harfoot-talk: cliché TV dialogue with a hobbity skin 1:15:09 The political conversation around the show 1:25:40 Shallow and arbitrary diversity is self-defeating 1:37:07 Erasing womanhood in the pursuit of “strong female characters” Links Read Nathan Douglas's film writing here https://vocationofcinema.substack.com Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

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 Italian or Roman history. It focuses on the conflict and collaboration between Michelangelo and his papal patron in the project of painting the Sistine Chapel. Sin (2019), directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, gives us a gritty, filthy Renaissance Florence and Rome and a Michelangelo who is something like a lovable hobo, outstandingly performed by Alberto Testone. Sin takes place in the fallow period of Michelangelo's career immediately after he painted the Sistine ceiling, in which his work was stalled by the conflict between his two patrons, the Della Rovere and Medici families. Rather than showing Michelangelo making art, it shows his spiritual and economic struggles during this period. As hesitant as the title Sin might make us, Elizabeth Lev praises it for correctly identifying avarice and pride as Michelangelo's sins, rather than focusing on the question of his sexuality as many do today. (Though the film is not free of sexual content involving other characters.) Fifty years ago, Konchalovsky co-wrote the greatest film about an artist: Andrei Rublev (directed by Andrei Tarkovsky). He identifies Sin as a continuation of the themes of Rublev. Indeed, both of these films about Michelangelo share with Rublev the tension between artistic/religious integrity and working for patrons who may be commissioning religious works for worldly motives. Links https://www.elizabeth-lev.com Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

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 about the satisfaction of human desire." Sweet Smell of Success is a sterling example of this theme in noir. "Success" is one of the great American idols, and the two acid-tongued protagonists of this film entertainingly embody the dark side of success in the seeking and the finding, as desperate publicity man Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) eats dirt instead of gravy from the train of ruthless gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). It's almost like Wormtongue and Saruman in Times Square, if Saruman's main goal were to stop his kid sister from marrying a jazz guitarist. But we don't want to spoil it for you... Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

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 their situation. James Majewski argues that the film is about trust or the lack thereof. It shows how quickly things get worse when we act as though we are in control of our circumstances. The film also defies any suspicion that something with the name “neo-realism”, which uses real locations and non-professional actors in order to better document social realities, will necessarily be drab, materialist and undramatic. Screenwriter Cesare Zavattini’s neo-realist slogan, “Life as it is”, is clarified by director Vittorio de Sica’s explanation of why he decided to make a film about the theft of a bicycle: “Uncovering the drama in everyday life, the wonderful in the daily news.” Bicycle Thieves is included on the Vatican’s 1995 list of important films, in the category of Values. Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio