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Catholic News Service
Taken on its own humanist terms, the apocalyptic drama “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World” is an essentially honorable film that celebrates the overarching importance of personal connectedness.
But the circumscribed nature of its outlook — amid the ultimate crisis, faith in God or in an afterlife is entirely absent — means that viewers will need to sift its mixed moral content with discernment.
Catholic News Service
The great 18th-century lexicographer and sage Samuel Johnson once observed that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
He was referring, of course, not to genuine love of country, but to the kind of frantic, chauvinistic flag-waving meant to divert attention from faults, scandals and hidden agendas.
Catholic News Service
“What to Expect When You’re Expecting” is a fruitless reproductive comedy that awkwardly juggles the stories of five expectant couples as they prepare for four deliveries and an Ethiopian adoption.
Director Kirk Jones’ fictionalization of Heidi Murkoff’s best-selling advice book veers between vulgar humor and trite sentimentality. It also showcases misguided contemporary attitudes toward sexuality, pregnancy and parenthood.
Catholic News Service
Long before “Twilight’s” Edward Cullen and other Johnny-come-lately vampires, there was television’s Barnabas Collins, played by the recently deceased Jonathan Frid. Time was when legions of teenage baby boomers would rush home from school each weekday afternoon to find out what Barnabas was up to by catching the latest episode of “Dark Shadows,” the wildly popular gothic soap opera that largely revolved around him.
Mostly set in 1972, the year after the television version went off the air director Tim Burton’s big-screen homage, “Dark Shadows” is a campy comic take on the original.
Catholic News Service
The macabre musings of Edgar Allan Poe have been adapted for the screen numerous times. In the latest instance, Poe is not only the central character, he’s also credited with being the progenitor of the horror movie genre.
While the makers of “The Raven” articulate the latter idea near the end of the proceedings, and only in passing, they’re clearly banking on it animating their tale. Instead, casting Poe as the forerunner of, say, low-budget horror director Roger Corman only underscores our sense that the author’s oeuvre is being picked at and that the film is straining to bring gravitas and wit to its own workaday mayhem and melancholia.
Catholic News Service
A lot of shtick, a little dance, a big live lobster down someone’s pants. That’s about what you’d expect from an updated version of “The Three Stooges.”
Far less predictable, and most unwelcome, is the assault on the dignity of those in religious life that also characterizes this highly uneven comedy.
Catholic News Service
What Catholic viewers make of the gently satiric seriocomedy “We Have a Pope” (“Habemus Papam”) (Sundance Selects) will largely depend on their reaction to the sight of teams of cardinals from the world’s various continents competing against each other in a volleyball tournament.
In addition to typifying the pitch of humor in this Italian import, the series of scenes devoted to that elaborate visual gag also are indicative of the film’s overall strengths and flaws: Harmlessly humorous — if undeniably silly — to start off with, they carry on far too long, signaling the artistic exhaustion which eventually causes the proceedings as a whole to sputter and stall.
Catholic News Service
Reputed to be one of the most frightening ghost stories ever written, Susan Hill’s 1983 novel “The Woman in Black” must certainly count as one of the sturdiest: It has been adapted both for British radio and U.K. television, while the 22-year-long run of its London stage version makes that property one of the longest-lived nonmusicals in West End history.
As penned for the big screen by Jane Goldman, directed by James Watkins and with Daniel Radcliffe headlining as barrister Arthur Kipps, the latest iteration of “The Woman in Black” aims for a classic horror feel.
Catholic News Service
“The Grey” respectfully obeys the immutable law of all story lines in which an aircraft crashes in the Arctic: Some folks are bound to get eaten.
This film, however, with its slight spiritual bent, ducks the cannibalism cliché and makes wolves the hungry ones. The animals are doing what they’re supposed to do by nature, stalking the survivors to thin out the human herd — the better, in the end, to kill them all.
Catholic News Service
There’s a double agent on the loose, and seemingly no one can be trusted in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” a faithful adaptation of John le Carre’s best-selling 1974 novel.
Swedish director Tomas Alfredson (“Let the Right One In”) sets a deliberately slow pace, especially for an espionage thriller, demanding the viewer’s full attention as he introduces pieces of the puzzle and juggles multiple characters and story lines, many told in flashback. It’s a journey that’s labyrinthine and sometimes confusing, disturbing and often gruesome, and it leads to a morally ambiguous resolution.
