This year I had the honour of participating in several discussions hosted by Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast. While continuing with the show’s main project - discussing every film on the 1995 Vatican Film List - we also found time to discuss some sidebar topics… like a certain Middle-Earth-set show of recent infamy.
All of the following episodes can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast apps. For the sake of brevity, I will be linking only to the Youtube versions here. Let’s dive in.
In February, we celebrated Leo McCarey’s screwball comedy masterpiece The Awful Truth (1937).
In March, we discussed Federico Fellini’s timeless and influential La Strada (1954) with poet and philosopher James Matthew Wilson.
In June we discussed Carl Theodor Dreyer’s monumental The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).
In August, I joined the Catholic Culture Podcast to discuss the role of music and movies as they relate to the human need for contemplation.
In September, we conducted an early post-mortem on Amazon Prime’s first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022).
In October, the month of St. Francis of Assisi, we covered two films about the life of the great 13th c. reformer and mystic: Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) and Liliana Cavani’s Francesco (1989).
Finally, we closed the year with Ermanno Olmi’s transcendent neo-realist historical masterwork The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978), joined by film scholar Maria Elena de las Carreras.
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