And may we suggest some alternatives? Every good religious movie is, in some way, about a test of faith and how the individual deals with that crisis -- because faith is not truly strong until it's tested. Here are some absolutely terrific movies that deal with that theme (as do some of the films on the Vatican's list), highly recommended for supplemental viewing.
Black Narcissus (Michael Powell, 1946) Deborah Kerr stars as a nun in the remote Himalayas in what is widely considered to be the most gorgeous Technicolor film ever made. Black Robe (Bruce Beresford, 1991) Harrowing tale of a Jesuit priest among the Indians in 17th Century Quebec. The Boys of St. Vincent (John N. Smith, 1993) Acclaimed two-part Canadian television film with Henry Czerny as a tortured priest accused of molesting boys. Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1950) Austere, quietly absorbing film about a parish priest in a small French village whose parishoners don't understand him. The Devil's Playground (Fred Schepisi, 1976) Compassionate and revealing tale of sin and temptation (and plumbing) in a Catholic boarding school. Forgotten Light (Vladimir Michalek, 1996) Luminous Czech film about a village priest trying to salvage his collapsing church despite government bureaucracy. My favorite picture at the 1997 Floating Film Festival. The Nun's Story (Fred Zinnemann, 1959) Audrey Hepburn is a novice whose faith is tested when becomes a missionary in the Begian Congo. Excellent look at the process of becoming a nun. Simon of the Desert (Luis Buñuel, 1965) Hilariously provocative and surreal parable based St. Simeon Stylites, who perched on top of a column in the desert and preached for 37 years back in the 5th century. Perfect companion piece to the Vatican's selection of Buñuel's brilliant Nazarin. (45 minutes)
More groovy lists!
|
Pick o' the Pope Here are some movies the Vatican actually wants you to see... By Jim Emerson Everybody's a critic. Even, now, the Vatican (www.vatican.va). And, no, I'm not talking about the old Catholic rating system that told you you'd go to hell if you saw Baby Doll or Kiss Me, Stupid. Instead of going around Condemning movies (as the Catholic Film Office has done for decades), the Vatican has decided to take a more upbeat approach and give a Big Thumbs Up to 45 movies it feels express Catholic tastes in three categories: Religion, Values, and Art. The selections, made by a Vatican committee in commemoration of the centenary of motion pictures in 1996, are films that The Church feels exemplify what's best about the medium. They are not just religious movies, but a surprisingly wide-ranging group, from Buñuel to Kubrick to Capra. If you haven't seen them... well, you don't have to say any Hail Marys or Our Fathers — just get thee to a video store (or, better yet, a repertory theater or academic/museum film series) and start worshiping. Here's the list (as near as I can tell—some of the specific versions of these titles weren't noted in the wire stories that ran in American newspapers), arranged by category, along with excerpts of prominent critics' (sometimes contrasting) reviews of them:
Andrei Roublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966) "Brilliantly devised and directed account of the famous 15th century icon painter, focusing on an age—old conflict: should an artist participate in the political and social upheavals of the time, or should he simply record history with his brush?" — Leonard Maltin The Mission (Roland Joffe, 1986) "You'd like to know why so many talented people went to such incredible lengths to make a difficult and beautiful movie—without any of them, on the basis of the available evidence, having the slightest notion of what the movie was about." — Roger Ebert The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928) "No other film has so subtly linked eroticism with religious persecution. Falconetti's Joan may be the finest performance ever recorded on film." — Pauline Kael The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1966) "Pasolini's interpretation features the rocky settings of Southern Italy, an eclectic score, and a rigid Jesus who demands obedience." — Pauline Kael Therese (Alain Cavalier, 1986) "Therese is not like any other biographical film of a saint—or of anyone else. It makes a bold attempt to penetrate to the mystery of Therese's sainthood, and yet it isn't propaganda for the church and it doesn't necessarily even approve of her choice of a vocation." — Roger Ebert Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955) "Arguably Dreyer's greatest film, but certainly the movies' final word on the struggle between conventional Christianity and more personalized religious faith. Truly awe—inspiring. . ." — Leonard Maltin The Sacrifice (Tarkovsky, 1986) "Slow, overly intense, but beautifully filmed (by Sven Nykvist) examination of the need for, and lack of, spirituality in modern society." — Leonard Maltin Francis (not the Talking Mule picture) Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) "Movie moguls have always had a real affinity for the grandiosity of the old Roman Empire ... Lew Wallace's hectic potboiler-classic has everything—even leprosy." — Pauline Kael Babette's Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987) "Subtle, funny and deeply felt, with several wonderful surprises: an instant masterpiece. . ." — Leonard Maltin Nazarin (Luis Bunuel, 1958) "The hero is a gentle Mexican priest—a Candide who is robbed and cheated—in this simple, masterly, ambiguous film by Luis Buñuel which is (perhaps in spite of his intention) his most tender." — Pauline Kael Monsieur Vincent (Jean Anouilh, 1947) "Pierre Fresnay's performance as the desperately compassionate Vincent de Paul gives extraordinary feeling to Jean Anouilh's sensitive, lucid scenario." — Pauline Kael A Man For All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966) "The director, Fred Zinnemann, places himself at the service of Robert Bolt's play about the moral tug of war between Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield) and Henry VIII (Robert Shaw), and the results are tasteful and moderately enjoyable." — Pauline Kael La Passion Pathe Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)
Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982) "Gandhi goes by
in a cloud of serenity, and everyone who sees him knuckles under (with the exception of a
few misguided fellows, of course). Ben Kingsley ... is impressive; the picture isn't ...
Kingsley can't give his role a core, because it has been written completely from the
outside. A viewer's reaction: 'I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't
know.'" — Pauline Kael Intolerance (D.W. Griffith, 1919) "D.W. Griffith's epic celebration of the potentialities of the film medium—perhaps the greatest movie ever made and the greatest folly in movie history." — Pauline Kael Il Decalogo (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1988) "[Kieslowski] confirmed his status as a major contemporary director with Decalogue (1988), an ambitious series of ten hour-long films funded by Polish TV, telling stories "based" on the Ten Commandments. (In Decalogue 10, for instance, two brothers, an accountant and a punk rocker, both covet the stamp collection they have inherited from their father.) In the same year, Kieslowski expanded segments five and six into two features, A Short Film About a Killing and A Short Film About Love. Partially set, like the rest of the series, on a Warsaw housing estate, A Short Film About a Killing is a grim and powerful tale drawing formal parallels between the act of murder and the workings of the criminal justice system." — from the Baseline biography of Kieslowski Au Revoir, Les Enfants (Louis Malle, 1987) "Deeply felt film based on an incident from Malle's youth, during WWII, when the headmaster of his Catholic boarding school decided to shield several Jewish children in the midst of Nazi-occupied France." — Leonard Maltin Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, 1975) "A poignant, poetic examination of contrasting lives." — Leonard Maltin The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi,1978) "A year in the life of a community of peasants in Northern Italy, just before the turn of the century. Simple, quietly beautiful epic; a work of art." — Leonard Maltin Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945) "Roberto Rossellini burst open the world with this film, made just after the Allies took Rome. The fame of his brutal, melodramatic account of the underground resistance to the Nazi occupation rests on its extraordinary immediacy and its rough, documentary look. . ." — Pauline Kael Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) "Ingmar Bergman's first
big popular success in the United States. It's a very uneven film: an eminent physician
(Victor Sjöström) looks back over his life, which is tricked up with gothic effects and
contrasts ... and with peculiarly unconvincing flashbacks and overexplicit dialogue. It's
a very lumpy odyssey, yet who can forget Sjöström's face. . .?" — Pauline
Kael The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) "The images and the omens are medieval, but the modern erotic and psychological insights add tension, and in some cases, as in the burning of the child—witch (Maud Hansson), excruciation. The actors' faces, the aura of magic, the ambiguities, and the riddle at the heart of the film all contribute to its stature." — Pauline Kael Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981) "The picture is a piece of
technological lyricism held together by the glue of simpleminded heroic sentiment;
basically, its appeal is in watching a couple of guys win their races." —
Pauline Kael The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio DeSica, 1950) "This neorealist classic, directed by Vittorio De Sica and written by Cesare Zavattini, is on just about everybody's list of the greatest films. It isn't a movie that warms you, though; it doesn't have the flawed poetry that De Sica's Shoeshine and Miracle in Milan have. It's a more impersonal great film." — Pauline Kael It's A Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) "What is remarkable about It's
a Wonderful Life is how well it holds up over the years; it's one of those ageless
movies, like Casablanca or The Third Man, that improves with age. Some
movies, even good ones, should only be seen once. When we know how they turn out, they've
surrendered their mystery and appeal. Other movies can be viewed an indefinite number of
times. Like great music, they improve with familiarity. It's a Wonderful Life
falls in the second category. ." — Roger Ebert Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) "In this movie, the best he has ever made, Spielberg treats the fact of the Holocaust and the miracle of Schindler's feat without the easy formulas of fiction. The movie is 184 minutes long, and like all great movies, it seems too short." — Roger Ebert On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) "The director, Elia Kazan, and the writer, Budd Schulberg, start out to expose racketeering in the waterfront unions, and wind up trying to make the melodrama transcend itself. They fail, but the production took eight Academy Awards anyway, and most of them were deserved. It is one of the most powerful American movies of the 50s, and few movies caused so much talk, excitement, and dissension—largely because of Marlon Brando's performance as the inarticulate, instinctively alienated bum, Terry Malloy." — Pauline Kael The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956) "Extraordinary anti-war
drama is affecting and memorable if a bit overlong." — Leonard Maltin
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) "It says that man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway to paradise; something better (i.e., non-human) is coming, and it's all out of your hands anyway. Kubrick's story line—which accounts for evolution by an extraterrestrial intelligence—is probably the most gloriously redundant plot of all time." — Pauline Kael "The genius is not in how much Stanley
Kubrick does in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but in how little. This is the work of an
artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to keep our
attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for
us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction
movies, 2001 is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our
awe." — Roger Ebert La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954) "The theme of Federico Fellini's spiritual fable is that everyone has a purpose in the universe ... Even if one rejects the concepts of this movie, its mood and the details of scenes stay with one; a year or two later, a gesture or a situation suddenly brings it all back." — Pauline Kael Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) "The Orson Welles film is generally considered the greatest American film of the sound period, and it may be more fun than any other great movie. Based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, it's an exuberant, muckraking attack on an archetypal economic baron." — Pauline Kael Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926) "H.G. Wells called this
German silent 'quite the silliest film'; Hitler was so impressed by the conception that
many years later he tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade its director, Fritz Lang, to make
Nazi movies ... One of the last examples of the imaginative—but often
monstrous—grandeur of the Golden Period of the German film, Metropolis is a
spectacular example of Expressionist design (grouped human beings are used
architecturally), with moments of almost incredible beauty and power (the visionary
sequence about the Tower of Babel), absurd ineptitudes (the lovesick hero in his
preposterous knickerbockers), and oddities that defy analysis (the robot vamp's bizarre,
lewd wink). It's a wonderful, stupefying folly." — Pauline Kael Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936) "After City Lights, which was silent, with a musical accompaniment and sound effects, Charlie Chaplin was absent from the screen for five years; he returned in triumph with this rambunctious comedy in which he still doesn't speak, although he uses background sounds and, as a singing waiter in a crowded cabaret, he does a wonderful jabberwocky patter song that you can't get out of your head. (It is, of course, a demonstration of how unnecessary words are.)" — Pauline Kael Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927) "Abel Gance originally made it as a 6-hour silent film, in color (the prints were tinted and toned by a dye process), and with sections designed to be run on a triple-width screen, by a process called Polyvision. His conception was far more complex than what directors later did with Cinerama, since Gance frequently used the images at the left and right of the central image for contrapuntal effects—history became an avalanche of armies, battles, and crowds. The film is both avant-garde and old-fashioned." — Pauline Kael 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963) "A long, difficult, but fascinating film, overflowing with creative and technical wizardry. Certainly one of the most intensely personal statements ever made on celluloid." — Leonard Maltin Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937) "In form, Grand Illusion is an escape story; yet who would think of it in this way? It's like saying that Oedipus Rex is a detective story. Among other things, this film is a study of human needs and the subtle barriers of class among a group of prisoners and their captors during the First World War." — Pauline Kael Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922) "To watch F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu is to see the vampire movie before it had really seen itself. Here is the story of Dracula before it was buried alive in cliches, jokes, TV skits, cartoons and more than 30 other films. The film is in awe of its material. It seems to really believe in vampires." — Roger Ebert "The original, superbly loathsome German version of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula is a concentrated essay in horror fantasy, full of weird, macabre camera effects. Though ludicrous at times (every horror film seems to become absurd after the passage of years, and many before—yet the horror remains), this first important film of the vampire genre has more spectral atmosphere, more ingenuity, and more imaginative ghoulish ghastliness than any of its successors. The movie often seems more closely related to demonic painting than to the later, rather rigid vampire-movie genre." — Pauline Kael Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) "Perhaps the most likable of
all Westerns, and a Grand Hotel-on-wheels movie that has just about
everything—adventure, romance, chivalry—and all of it very simple and
traditional." — Pauline Kael The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963) "Magnificent—a sweeping popular epic, with obvious similarities to Gone With the Wind, and with an almost Chekhovian sensibility." — Pauline Kael Fantasia (Walt Disney, 1940) "Initially, the film was a box—office failure, but it proved successful in revivals, especially in the early 70s, when it became a popular head film, because of such ingredients as the abstract first section, the mushroom dance during 'The Nutcracker' (one of the liveliest sequences), and the overly bright—somewhat psychedelic—color. 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice,' featuring Mickey Mouse, and parts of other sequences are first-rate Disney, but the total effect is grotesquely kitschy." — Pauline Kael The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) "It somehow seems real and important in a way most movies don't. Is that because we see it first when we're young? Or simply because it is a wonderful movie? Or because it sounds some buried universal note, some archetype or deeply felt myth? "I lean toward the third possibility, that the elements in ``The Wizard of Oz'' powerfully fill a void that exists inside many children. For kids of a certain age, home is everything, the center of the world. But over the rainbow, dimly guessed at, is the wide earth, fascinating and terrifying. There is a deep fundamental fear that events might conspire to transport the child from the safety of home and strand him far away in a strange land. And what would he hope to find there? Why, new friends, to advise and protect him. And Toto, of course, because children have such a strong symbiotic relationship with their pets that they assume they would get lost together. This deep universal appeal explains why so many different people from many backgrounds have a compartment of their memory reserved for The Wizard of Oz.'' — Roger Ebert "A genuine American classic ... Just as good the fifteenth time as it is the first time." — Leonard Maltin The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951) "It's a minor classic, a charmer." — Pauline Kael Little Women (George Cukor, 1933) "There are small
flaws—a few naïve and cloying scenes, some obvious dramatic contrivances—but
it's a lovely, graceful film, and surprisingly faithful to the atmosphere, the Victorian
sentiments, and the Victorian strengths of the Louisa May Alcott novel." —
Pauline Kael
|
