Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast

Film critic and deacon Steven Greydanus joins the show to discuss one of the best movies about a saint ever made,  Monsieur Vincent . The film depicts St. Vincent de Paul's invention of the organized charity we take for granted today, and his struggle to stay personally close to the poor despite the practical need to court the favor of the rich to support his work. This isn't a film about a man co...

James and Thomas, with the help of filmmaker and critic Nathan Douglas, tackle Alain Cavalier's 1986 film Thérèse , an unconventional portrait of the beloved French saint known as the Little Flower. It gives them a chance to ask the question: What makes for a great saint movie? One of the great strengths of the film is actress Catherine Mouchet's amazing physical resemblance to Thérèse, but also t...

It's remarkable that as recently as 1986, we had a hit movie, with A-list stars (Jeremy Irons, Robert De Niro) and an A-list composer (Ennio Morricone), that takes a nuanced look at a controversial historical subject, European Christian missionary activity. The Mission  could not be made today.  The Mission was written by Robert Bolt (A Man for All Seasons, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago ) and...

The podcast returns to yet another episode from Dekalog , the series of Polish short films inspired by the Ten Commandments. Part seven, based on the commandment "Thou shalt not steal", is about a young woman who kidnaps her own daughter. It asks the question: can you steal something that belongs to you? But it also asks: what happens when motherhood is stolen from you? Part seven also returns to...

A Quiet Place Part II  is a more straightforward horror film than its predecessor, with less emotional weight, but it delivers on well-executed suspense and action while faithfully carrying forward the first film's themes of themes of family and self-sacrifice. Thomas and James discuss the series' remarkable use of silence to enhance the dramatic weight of even the slightest sound. James points to...

James and Thomas interview Sixtine Leon-Dufour, writer of the new Lourdes documentary, one of the best religious films in recent years. She discusses: Her background caring for the sick at Lourdes How she convinced the Lourdes authorities to give secular filmmakers unprecedented shooting access to this holy place How a documentary about a Marian pilgrimage got the support of a large French secular...

A new documentary on Lourdes, originally released in France in 2019, is now in theaters in the US. It is intensely moving and one of the best religious films in recent years. Written by a Catholic who used to care for the sick at Lourdes, it is an inside look at the spiritual but also deeply human needs and aspirations that lead people to this place of miracles. The film follows a a small selectio...

In this episode from the Catholic Culture Podcast, Thomas is joined by Catholic filmmaker Nathan Douglas to discuss Walker Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer . They examine the malaise-ridden protagonist Binx Bolling's "search" for meaning, which he ultimately finds through responsibility: not the responsibility urged by respectable "values", but that urged by love. They also look at how Binx sear...

There are a few films on the Vatican film list James and Thomas haven't been looking forward to watching. Among them is Richard Attenborough's Gandhi , and our dread was due to the suspicion that this film, certainly negligible in its historical importance as a work of cinema, was included mainly because Vatican bureaucrats of a certain age are apt to confuse Mohandas K. Gandhi with a Catholic sai...

Federico Fellini's  8 1/2  is widely considered to be the best film ever made about filmmaking, but it's about much more than that. Ingenious cinematography and surreal images convey the experience of a man who is increasingly lost in his own memory and fantasy, and so finds himself unable to have real relationships with the people in his life or to bear fruit as an artist. Not all uses of imagina...

In honor of Pope St. John Paul the Great's birthday, James and Thomas discuss the 2005 film about his life starring Cary Elwes as the young Karol Wojtyla and Jon Voight as Pope John Paul II. One of the strengths of the film, made within a few months of the saint's death, is its portrayal of John Paul II's Polishness and how it influenced him as a world leader. Other aspects of the film are outdate...

The sixth episode of Kieslowski's Dekalog series inspired by the Ten Commandments, included in the Vatican's 1995 list of great films, deals with a characteristically modern form of adultery: voyeurism. The film begins from the perspective of a peeping tom, but gradually we start to see things through the eyes of the promiscuous woman he spies on, as the conscience of each begins to awaken. Circum...

A good priest is threatened with death for the sins of an evil one. He has one week to prepare. That is the simple premise of John Michael McDonagh's 2014 film Calvary , starring Brendan Gleeson. This portrait of a heroic but very human priest illuminates the crucifixions, mundane or dramatic, faced by good parish priests everywhere, but especially in post-Catholic cultures such as Ireland, in whi...

In 1962, inspired by Pope St. John XXIII's outreach to non-Christian artists, a gay communist picked up the Gospels and ended up making a film about Jesus. Nervous yet? But one thing you can't fault Pier Paolo Pasolini for is taking liberties with his source material - the dialogue in The Gospel According to Matthew is drawn entirely from that book of the Bible. The Vatican's newspaper once called...

In anticipation of Season 2 of The Chosen , the popular TV series based on the Gospels, Thomas and James take a look back at Season 1 and what made it so remarkable. They are joined by Brother Joshua Vargas, a filmmaker, artist, and novice at the Oratory in Philadelphia. The show's two greatest strengths are its writing, which James calls "an education in meditation on the Gospels", and Jonathan R...

"The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good." Andrei Tarkovsky Could Andrei Rublev be the best film on the Vatican film list? Andrei Tarkovsky is widely regarded as one of the greatest spiritual filmmakers of all time, and his 1966 masterpiece Andrei Rublev lives up to that reputation. In this deeply moving and at times c...

Based on a memoir by famous Russian explorer Vladimir Arseniev, Dersu Uzala (1975) is a heartwarming adventure tale about the unlikely friendship between a man of civilization and a man of the wilderness. On a mission to map the Russian Far East, Arseniev encounters Dersu Uzala, a hunter and member of the Goldi people, from whom he learns much about the strange courtesies of life in the wild, base...

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/PrsVkxtBgyo There is only one American film in the "Religion" section of the Vatican film list: William Wyler's 1959 epic  Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ . Its epic scale and its astonishing set pieces such as the sea battle and the chariot race make the small, understated moments when Jesus enters the story all the more striking. Thomas and James are joined by Ca...

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-R68p8Lkxgw We enjoy The Mandalorian more than any other recent Star Wars productions. But its second season sometimes doesn't trust us to suspend our disbelief in certain respects (a misguided literalism in its use of CGI for a major human character), while elsewhere expecting us to accept, on ideological grounds, things that are unbelievable even in its fantasy...

Watch on YouTube:  https://youtu.be/uYdtpAoLjo8 This film makes us confront on a visceral level the horror of taking a human life, even the life of someone we might find despicable. It is the fifth installment of Dekalog , the famous Polish TV series inspired by the Ten Commandments. Dekalog: Five , which was expanded into the feature-length A Short Film About Killing , coincided with an intense d...

Mel Gibson playing Santa fending off an assassin sent by a spoiled brat who got coal for Christmas is a premise as absurd as it is entertaining. Fatman, the latest in a series of thematically similar roles for Gibson, delivers on both the entertainment and the absurdity while also taking itself more seriously than we might expect. We live in what has been described as a "therapeutic culture" in wh...

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhLMHBBirC0 It's time for Criteria's Christmas episode—time to watch the classic tale of a man who, through divine intervention, overcomes regret, jealousy and despair to realize how precious and magical is the life he already has. James and Thomas discuss Catholic director Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life with popular podcaster and writer Patri...

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/cCpqMLBg0Ro Almost one hundred years ago, the great German director Fritz Lang offered us a beautiful yet nightmarish vision of a world strangely similar to our present. Society is unimaginably prosperous yet produces mass misery. There is a sense of an end coming for Babel. Amidst growing class resentment, the Whore of Babylon appears in the form of a machine in...

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/zUBvgrpvqa0   Krzysztof Kieślowski's  DEKALOG (1988) is a series of 10 short films inspired by the Ten Commandments. With this episode we discuss the fourth film in the series, which deals with the fourth commandment: "Honor thy father and mother."   In this fraught installment, a father is challenged to definitively embrace his paternal role as authority and pro...

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vMy1YU1bczE   James and Thomas discuss an animated classic, Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940), with Oscar-nominated animator and director Timothy Reckart ("Head Over Heels", The Star ). Included in the conversation are some remarks touching upon Fantasia 2000 (1999). Both films are available for streaming on Disney+. Speaking about the film, Walt Disney said, " Fanta...