Most biopics try to penetrate the mystery of what makes a great artist, but 'Mr. Turner' deliberately preserves that mystery, and seals it into our hearts and minds.
As mainstream news organizations were losing their claim on authority and trust, Jon Stewart used smarts and comedy to establish his own journalistic credibility.
Lawrence painted what he saw and what he knew: strivers and beggars, children and prostitutes, gamblers and preachers, and above all women, like his mother.
Clint Eastwood's 'American Sniper' has provoked criticism from both right and left. It's awash in patriotic spirit, it glorifies war. It's also a pretty bad movie.
'Selma' dramatizes one moment in the civil-rights movement when Martin Luther King, wracked by doubts and intimations of mortality, could have put his goals on hold.
An exhibit pulls together an impressive collection of paintings, sculptures, and liturgical vestments to suggest the wide range of Marian images in Western art.
One movie too obviously geared to celebrate a Triumph of the Human Spirit; another whose writing and acting skillfully adduce the nature of the hero's character.
The Catholic painter Peter Paul Rubens presents a particular challenge to classification—decorative, theatrical, busy, pagan, and only superficially Christian.
Written before he and seven fellow monks were kidnapped and beheaded in 1996, this personal journal reflects story of Algeria in crisis and courageous spirituality.
How can a civilization that produced Michelangelo and Fellini also have spawned the Mafia and Mussolini? And how can 'The Godfather' be an expression of ethnicity?
Alejandro González Iñárritu has made something that looks and feels unique, with a cast that works with such ensemble perfection I hesitate to single anyone out.
The via pulchritudinis is never far from me in my life as a Catholic, and it has been particularly with me lately as I’ve listened to Eventide by Voces8.
"Rosewater"—set in an Iranian prison—is painful, poignant, at times funny and humanizing. "Nightcrawler"—a monster movie that wants to be a social indictment—isn't.
The reduction of character and motive to diagrammable banalities seems of a piece with this film’s lack of interest in creating anything resembling human emotion.
