Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast

Oscar-nominated writer and director Timothy Reckart rejoins the podcast to discuss a movie that has a marked resonance with the Nativity story, Alfonso Cuaron's brilliantly crafted dystopian thriller Children of Men. Set in 2027, it depicts a world that has fallen into despair and chaos because of a worldwide infertility crisis: no one has been able to have a baby in eighteen years. The film, made...

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 t...

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: ...

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 fallin...

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 un...

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, wh...

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 re...

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 t...

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 h...

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 k...

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 re...

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 C...

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-examinat...

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 Guadalc...

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 film...

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...

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...

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 compa...

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...

DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter:  https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters

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.o...

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 Catholi...

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 d...

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 emotion...

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, Ta...