This evening, Friday, March 22, I'll be appearing on the first hour of “Catholic Answers Live” (6pm–7pm EDT).
This Friday, April 13 I'll be appearing on the first hour of “Catholic Answers Live” (6pm–7pm EDT).
This Friday, May 4 I'll be appearing on the first hour of “Catholic Answers Live” (6pm–7pm EDT).
This Friday, June 22, I'll be appearing on the first hour of “Catholic Answers Live” (6pm–7pm EDT).
This Friday, September 28 I'll be appearing on the first hour of “Catholic Answers Live” (6pm–7pm EDT).
This Friday, September 30, I’ll be on the second hour of Catholic Answers Live! (7pm–8pm EDT). Patrick Coffin and I will be talking about new and older movies including The Way, Courageous, The Lion King, Machine Gun Preacher, Moneyball, Dolphin Tale, Contagion, Citizen Kane, Warrior and more.
Tuesday, 1/10: This afternoon I’ll be on Catholic radio twice in the 5 o’clock hour (EST) discussing a pair of movies with very Catholic themes (a comment that should not be taken as an endorsement!).
This evening, I’ll be on Catholic radio from sometime during the last hour of “Kresta in the Afternoon” (5pm EDT) through the first hour of “Catholic Answers Live” (6pm EDT), discussing the latest movies and much more. Listen live
“A Going My Way with substance” is how Elia Kazan’s classic, controversial On the Waterfront was recently described in a lecture at Boston College.
At once delicate and gritty, wistful and deeply satisfying, John Carney’s Once is a intimate little film that, like a favorite song, you would rather play for someone than try to describe.
Quentin Tarantino’s gifts are impossible to deny, but while I often find his set pieces mesmerizing, I have yet to fully buy into one of his films. This might be the closest one yet, though.
Many movies have made me cry. Very few have been as difficult or impossible even to write about without crying as Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang’s brilliant, devastating Sundance Grand Jury winner One Child Nation.
Who is right? The issues are complex, and historians and faithful Catholics disagree (see related article). One Man’s Hero is sympathetic to the St. Pats and critical of American "Manifest Destiny" expansionism and anti-Catholicism.
Even movie-savvy Catholics often haven’t heard of One Man’s Hero, Lance Hool’s 1999 film about the San Patricios, a group of Irish Catholic immigrants in the 1840s who joined the U.S. Army but deserted after suffering religious and ethnic persecution, fled to Catholic Mexico, and wound up fighting on the Mexican side in the U.S.-Mexican War. The film, starring Tom Beringer, never got a proper U.S. theatrical release, and hasn’t been promoted on video and DVD, even in Catholic markets and media.
Christians lamenting the state of Hollywood sometimes flippantly comment that this or that Bible story “would make a great movie — intrigue, sex, violence, spectacle, etc.” This, though, is not a recipe for a great movie, but for a mediocre one. The story of Esther could certainly be made into a great film. One Night with the King is not that film. In some ways, it’s not even that story.
Pixar’s movies tend to play as metaphors for the creative rise and fall of Pixar itself. When someone says “Maybe this place isn’t as adventurous as it used to be,” it’s hard not to hear an echo of the filmmakers’ voices.
Open letter to the mother sitting in front of me at last week’s Cradle 2 the Grave screening: Your daughter seemed to be about 8 years old, with her white dress and her hair done up in braids. I wonder what she thought when the people in this
Gunplay is largely restricted to a single, lengthy sequence; and, where in a typical action movie thousands of bullets might be expended without anyone in the audience batting an eye, in this film every bullet counts, and the viewer feels its impact.
It was the experience of reporting in Jerusalem on the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial for The New Yorker that led the philosopher Hannah Arendt to coin her famous phrase “the banality of evil.”
Roland Joffé, director of The Mission and There Be Dragons, calls himself an agnostic, but he seems to be a remarkably God-haunted one.
Copyright © 2000– Steven D. Greydanus. All rights reserved.