Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945) bring us back to a very different period in American culture, where the immensely popular singer Bing Crosby could make a movie playing a priest of essentially spotless character, and that movie could win six Oscars and be popular...

James and Thomas discuss the original creepy clown movie, He Who Gets Slapped, starring Lon Chaney in an amazing performance as scientist Paul Beaumont, who suffers a mental breakdown after his research and his wife are stolen by a wealthy baron. Leaving his former world behind, Beaumont...

In the 1996 British comedy-drama Secrets & Lies, a young middle-class black woman in London, having lost both of her adoptive parents, decides to seek out her biological mother—who turns out to be a working-class white woman named Cynthia. Director Mike Leigh is known for...

James, Thomas, and Nathan Douglas conclude their journey through Terrence Malick’s filmography (thus far) with a discussion of the film that introduced him to many Catholics: A Hidden Life, about the Austrian martyr Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, who was killed for refusing to...

Anthony D’Ambrosio directed, wrote, and produced the outstanding new film Triumph of the Heart about St. Maximilian Kolbe. In this inspiring interview, he discusses the difficult path he and his team charted to produce this independent film with a low budget, high artistic standards, and...

Roberto Rossellini’s 1946 World War II film Paisan has a unique structure: six vignettes following the American troops from their landing in north through Naples, Rome, Florence, Romagna, and the Po Delta. However, the film takes the perspective of the Italians, with the Americans more...

His Excellency Erik Varden, Trappist monk and bishop of Trondheim, Norway, joins Thomas Mirus and James Majewski for a discussion of the art of cinema. The interview touches on the danger of violent images, saint movies, the relationship between film and theater, the private vs. theatrical...

Into Great Silence is one of the all-time great documentaries from an artistic point of view, and surely the best ever made on a Catholic subject. Filmmaker Philip Gröning contacted the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps in 1984, asking if he could come and film the Carthusian...

Brideshead Revisited is much discussed as a beloved Catholic novel. But it is also perhaps the only instance of a great book getting a screen adaptation that is equally good—almost to the point of being interchangeable with the book. We refer, of course, to the 1981 miniseries, not the...

Nathan Douglas and Thomas Mirus review Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. It is not necessarily a bad thing if an adaptation doesn’t reproduce the precise worldview of its source material—an artist makes his own work of art, not a scholarly translation....