Tags :: Pope Fiction and Non-fiction

REVIEW

The Two Popes (2019)

For a Catholic critic — or at least for this Catholic critic — a movie like The Two Popes presents a number of temptations.

ARTICLE

Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan and The Divine Plan: Filmmaker Robert Orlando (Interview)

Anyone who directs a movie about the converging efforts of Pope St. John Paul II and Ronald Reagan to take on the Soviet Union is someone I’m interested in talking to. But Robert Orlando isn’t just anyone to me.

POST

Pope Francis: A Man of His Word [video] (2018)

The year’s second-best inspirational documentary about an iconic leader with an ability to connect with people as individuals is still pretty good.

REVIEW

Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (2018)

Wim Wenders, whose eclectic career has embraced arthouse dramas, documentaries, music videos and concert films, approaches the subject of his latest nonfiction film from an unusual perspective: the significance of an unprecedented papal name.

ARTICLE

Pixar and the Pope: Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ and Pixar’s Wall-E

“The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” Pope Francis writes. “In many parts of the planet, the elderly lament that once beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbish” (LS 21). From the outset Wall-E looks as if it had been created with these words in mind, projecting them into a dystopian future in which rubbish has expanded to cover the entire planet, even surrounding the Earth in a halo of space debris.

POST

Habemus Papam?

Do we have a pope? Do we even have a movie?

REVIEW

We Have a Pope [Habemus Papam] (2012)

In a way it’s like the antithesis of a Dan Brown novel. Brown’s stories peer with feverish, lurid imagination at the inner workings of the Catholic hierarchy, discovering all manner of ridiculous subterfuge, ruthlessness and skulduggery. Moretti’s film hardly peers at all.

POST

We Have a Pope [Habemus Papam] [video]

We Have a Pope in 60 seconds: My “Reel Faith” video review.

POST

Sarandon calls pope “Nazi”; ADL calls for apology

Memo to Susan Sarandon, vis-a-vis your “Nazi pope” comments this weekend: Joseph Ratzinger was a victim of the Nazi horror.

ARTICLE

Harry Potter vs. the Pope?

To summarize: What we have is an informal, brief, obscurely worded opinion, in a private letter that may or may not have been written by Ratzinger himself, apparently declining to comment on a book that he may or may not have perused about a series of books he may or may not have ever laid eyes on.

REVIEW

Angels & Demons (2009)

Once you’ve established that your story is set in a world in which Jesus Christ is explicitly not God, and the Catholic religion is a known fraud perpetuated by murder and cover-ups, it sort of sucks the wind out of whatever story it was you were going to tell us next. Langdon could be ironing his chinos and helping little old ladies across the street, and it would still be set in that world, and those of us who care about such things will find it hard to bracket that and just go along with the thrill machine.

ARTICLE

Rome and Geneva: Religion and Science in Angels & Demons

When Sony Pictures, the production company behind the hit film The Da Vinci Code and the new sequel Angels & Demons, reached out to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN management in Geneva saw a high-profile teachable moment for science.

ARTICLE

Lies, Damned Lies and Dan Brown: Fact-checking Angels & Demons

In a Q&A billed as an “interview” on his own website, Brown writes (in a comment recently highlighted by Carl Olson in This Rock), “My goal is always to make the character’s [sic] and plot be so engaging that readers don’t realize how much they are learning along the way.” Or how much misinformation they’re absorbing.

ARTICLE

Constantine’s Sword: James Carroll’s flawed history comes to the screen (2007)

The most serious problem with Constantine’s Sword, though, is not its historical distortions. The most serious problem is its out-and-out attack on Christianity as such. It is not merely antisemitism that troubles Carroll. It is not even only Jesus’ death and resurrection. Ultimately, it is the very belief that in Jesus God did something both unique and definitive, something with universal applicability for all mankind.

REVIEW

The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968)

Fascinating despite flaws, The Shoes of the Fisherman is impossible to watch first of all as a movie. By a strange twist of chance or fate, it demands to be viewed as a curious, at times almost prescient anticipation of the reign of John Paul II, filtered partly through the lens of the Silly Sixties.

ARTICLE

Stories of Karol: Telling the life of a man who became pope

Karol: A Man Who Became Pope isn’t the first TV movie on the life of Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II — but among the new crop of Pope movies coming in the wake of the Holy Father’s death, it’s not only the first, but also the only one seen and praised both by Benedict XVI and John Paul II himself.

REVIEW

Witness to Hope: The Life of Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II (2002)

In the crowd of TV documentaries on the life of Pope John Paul II, there is Witness to Hope, and there is everything else.

REVIEW

Pope John Paul II (2005)

Not to be confused with the identically named 1984 Herbert Wise film starring Albert Finney, Pope John Paul II is the first — so far the only — dramatic presentation to do anything like justice to the life and reign of the 20th century’s most popular pope.

REVIEW

A&E Biography: Pope John Paul II — Statesman of Faith (1993)

Pope John Paul II gets the A&E “Biography” treatment in Pope John Paul II — Statesman of Faith, a 50-minute documentary made in 1993 focusing particularly on the Holy Father’s crusades against totalitarianism and violence.

REVIEW

The Jeweller’s Shop (1990)

The story is propelled by ordinary (though sometimes philosophically elevated) dialogue, and a mysterious character in the play, Adam, becomes a simple priest — a rather Wojtyla-like priest, actually, who takes the young people of his parish on nature hikes in the mountains.