Opinion

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Be merry, really merry. The life of a true Christian should be a perpetual jubilee, a prelude to the festivals of eternity. — Bl. Théophane Vénard The post Bl. Théophane Vénard—Be merry, really merry. … appeared first on Catholic Digest. ... read more

There’s more than one way to pray the Rosary. If you have a special devotion to St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast we celebrate on Oct. 4, or if you’d simply like to explore a different angle on a familiar form of prayer, the Franciscan Crown Rosary may be for you. The Franciscan Crown celebrates ... read more

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My father died a year ago, and when I preached at his funeral Mass I was struck by the fact that when my grandfather died 32 years earlier and my father (then a Reformed minister) preached at his funeral, my father had been younger than I was last year. For some reason my father ... read more

D+ SDG Original source: Catholic World Report Six years after its release, Scott Derrickson’s Doctor Strange remains one of the best Marvel movies, and certainly one of the ... read more

C.S. Lewis, in his preface to St. Athanasius’ On The Incarnation, wrote a brisk apologia for reading premodern authors, later published under the title “On the Reading of Old Books.” Lewis’s simple thesis is that we are all inescapably cultural products of a particular time and place, and reading old books broadens our horizons, ... read more

“Life’s gonna give you a gutful of reasons to be angry,” a mysterious stranger tells Stuart Long (Mark Wahlberg) near a key turning point in his ambivalent quest for meaning. “You only need one to be grateful.” It’s a pretty healthy-minded aphorism, but Stuart is skeptical. I forget his exact response, but it’s something ... read more

A decade or more ago, if the protagonist of an animated film had a disapproving, overbearing, or blinkered parental figure with overly restrictive ideas about their offspring’s life, that parent was usually the father. Domineering dads were a notable trope of the 1990s Disney renaissance, from King Triton in The Little Mermaid to Tarzan’s ... read more

A- SDG Original source: Catholic World Report Among the many shrewd conflations made by Erica Schmidt in adapting Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac as a musical, first ... read more

Life isn’t exactly back to normal — whatever “normal” may mean now, or in the future — either for the movies or for me. I did see more movies in 2021 than in 2020, but I still did less reviewing than in previous years. On December 31, 2020, I wrote to a friend confiding my ... read more

Watching The Batman, I found myself thinking about the Zorro connection and especially about those two early Zorro movies — and the differences between them. Among these differences are contrasting visions of the hero’s relationship to the people he defends: Is a hero a savior or champion standing alone between the powers of evil ... read more

Jon Watts. Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alfred Molina, Willem Dafoe, Marisa Tomei, Jon Favreau, Andrew Garfield, Tobey Maguire, Benedict Wong, Jamie Foxx, Rhys Ifans, Thomas Haden Church, J.K. Simmons. Disney/Marvel. Artistic/Entertainment Value Moral/Spiritual Value +2 Age Appropriateness Kids & Up* MPAA ... read more

I’ve always loved movies, of course. I took film and animation history classes at the School of Visual Arts, but I was a media major, not a film major (my first love was cartooning and illustration). As a young Catholic convert, I went on to earn a graduate degree in religious studies from St. ... read more

The rosary, the Eucharist, and other tokens of the sacred that would figure significantly in Stoker’s novel play no role in the earlier work. Lord Ruthven slew his victims’ bodies, but there was no indication that the fate of their souls was at stake. The story ends with the grisly discovery of Ruthven’s latest ... read more

“Immense joy and great suffering” is how a French priest interviewed for Purgatory, from the Polish Catholic documentarian Michal Kondrat, describes the state of the holy souls undergoing purification. There are other helpful perspectives sprinkled through the film, mostly in similar talking-head interview footage featuring Polish, Italian, or French priests. These are overshadowed, though, ... read more

This archetype can be broadly called “The Man” or “the Powers that Be.” Always a powerful, patriarchal establishment figure, like Obadiah Stane, Nick Fury, or Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford’s character in Captain America: The Winter Soldier), The Man is often the protagonist’s actual father, like Howard Stark or Black Panther’s father T’Chaka. Sometimes Dad ... read more

Dune has long had a reputation for being “unfilmable,” not in the a priori sense that, say, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion or James Joyce’s Ulysses might be considered unfilmable due to their unusual formal qualities, but in a de facto sense, given the varying failures of high-profile efforts to adapt the dense novel for ... read more