The Chosen, Season 4: Lectio Divina or Fan Fiction?
Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast
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 falling away of Judas, and Jesus’ sorrow and frustration at his disciples’ inability to hear His predictions of His imminent death. This season still has some of the great moments that have made The...
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Church Teaching on Cinema: Vatican II and Beyond
Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast
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 unique artistic medium, Vatican II's decree Inter Mirifica set the template for lumping all modern mass media together under the label of "social communications" - discussing them as new technology and...
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A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast
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, whose strong sense of honor and justice is pulled in various directions as he gets caught up in a youth gang and romantically entangled with the girlfriend of a disappeared gang leader. But more than...
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Pope Pius XII on The Ideal Film, Pt. 2 (Church Teaching on Cinema)
Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast
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 relation to the spectator. In this second audience, he discusses the ideal film both in relation to its content, and in relation to society. He makes general observations on the legitimate...
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Pope Pius XII on The Ideal Film, Pt. 1 (Church Teaching on Cinema)
Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast
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 the two exhortations. Pius begins with an insightful discussion of the psychological effects of film on the viewer, not only insofar as the viewer is passive, but insofar as the viewer is invited to...
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Church Teaching on Cinema: Pope Pius XI
Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast
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 had recently taken by the American bishops to influence the motion picture industry in a moral direction, as well as to protect their own flocks from immoral movies. Vigilanti cura was ghostwritten by...
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Wildcat does justice to Flannery O'Connor's faith (w/ Joshua Hren)
Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast
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 keeps the film from feeling like a formulaic biopic). Wildcat's portrayal of the relationship between artistic ambition and faith is deeply relevant to Catholic artists. It should inspire them to...
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Malick’s humble camera: The New World (2005)
Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast
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 realism and historical accuracy with poetry and romance, as all three protagonists explore not just one but multiple new worlds, geographical and interior. With The New World, Malick definitively...
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A study of pastoral prudence: Léon Morin, Priest (1961)
Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast
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 Catholicism. Barny starts to see Fr. Morin regularly for a mix of intellectual tête-à-tête and spiritual counsel, and is gradually drawn back to the Church—but mixed in with her spiritual...
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Studies of ambition: All About Eve, The Bad and the Beautiful
Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast
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-examination of Hollywood itself. The latter contains the more perceptive observations of artistic genius and its operations, which tend to subordinate everything to the work to be done. More broadly,...
info_outlineIntroducing 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 Catholic or Orthodox communities. Indeed, while the director is clearly influenced by Western movies, much of his films' vitality comes from how regionally rooted they are, not just in Kerala but even in specific cities and villages.
Pellissery's films show a remarkable level of craft, artistry and experimentation considering their mainstream success in India - indeed, as James Majewski says by contrast with contemporary Hollywood, this seems to be what an "alive film culture" looks like. Within the Malayalam film industry, Pellissery is known as the "Master of Chaos", presumably due to the spontaneous feeling of his scenes, often featuring large, rambunctious crowds, and perhaps also the way situations in his stories tend to spiral out of control. His films keep you riveted in a way that is not manipulative, and they are unpredictable without being dependent on contrived twists.
James and Thomas feature three of Pellissery's films in this discussion, in order to explore his diversity of genre:
Jallikattu is an off-the-wall action movie about villagers trying to chase down an escaped bull - framed within quotations from the book of Revelation which seem to indicate that the bull represents Satan. Ee.Ma.Yau (which means "Jesus, Mary, Joseph")) is about a son struggling to provide a good funeral for his father, but constantly being frustrated by his own limits. Pellissery's most recent film, Like an Afternoon Dream, is a slow, surreal drama - arguably a ghost story - about a man who suddenly takes on another man's identity.
Here are links to view the films in their original Malayalam language with English subtitles:
Jallikattu https://www.amazon.com/Jallikattu-Antony-Varghese/dp/B07ZQMQ9TT
Ee.Ma.Yau https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZNDgzLsPZ8&ab_channel=OPMRecords
Like an Afternoon Dream https://www.netflix.com/title/81676305
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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com