What are some of your favorites?
I love Song of Bernadette and Our Lady of Fatima, and the recent one, Fatima.
People will think this is a weird choice because on the surface it seems anti-religion, but
Kingdom of Heaven. I just love how beautifully it's shot, and I think most of the characters are actually good faithful Catholics. They're not perfect, but they're doing God's work...and it's a beautiful glimpse of the Holy Land when it was ruled by Christendom.
Yeah I understand the director's intention was to make the Templars look corrupt and Guy de Lusignan and Reynald de Chatillon were portrayed as wicked villains and Saladin was supposed to look like some kind of merciful hero or antihero. They kind of suggested the Knights Hospitaller were kind of hippie Christians like today's Jesuits or even like the Shane Claiborne evangelicals; they wanted to portray the true believers as mindless zealots and the irreligious as rational thinkers. I just ignore that, or mentally reflect on what these people were actually like based on undistorted historical accounts.
All the same, I have a weird reflexive ability to watch movies like this and decipher who the good guys and bad guys really are despite the culture spin the liberal director tries to put on the story, and then I can just enjoy the visual storytelling. So I look at Kingdom of Heaven and I just think "DEUS VULT!" Same thing when I watched the first season of HBO's "The Young Pope". I think the intent of that show was to make the whole Vatican just seem like this terribly corrupt cesspool and Pope Pius XIII (Jude Law) like some kind of radical fascist would was undoing decades of modernization in the Church (one scene even suggesting that he was going to be contravening Pope Franics' work). But I just look at a story like that and think "Yeah man I hope our next Pope looks like Pius XII! No satire here I wanna Pope that's hard nosed like him!"
Now don't get me wrong, I'd love to see, say, Mel Gibson take that same story and accomplish the same visual excellence but tell the story of the Third Crusade truthfully with the understanding that the Christians were the righteous faction, no matter what kinds of sins and indiscretions were committed by the individuals involved.
A more overtly Catholic film I really enjoyed was
For Greater Glory about the Cristero War. It has a surprisingly incredible cast for a movie that's specifically about Catholic heroes, it stars Andy Garcia, Oscar Isaac, Eva Longoria, Peter O'Toole, Ruben Blades, Bruce Greenwood, Bruce McGill. It was (and still could be) the most expensive film production ever done in Mexico, and it's a really compelling film.
