Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast CatholicCulture.org

In occupied France during World War II, a Communist woman named Barny (Emmanuelle Riva) enters a confessional for the first time since her first Communion. She is there not to confess but to troll the priest by saying “Religion is the opiate of the people.” To her surprise, Fr. Léon Morin (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is not thrown off balance, but offers a compelling response to each of her critiques of Catholicism. Barny starts to see Fr. Morin regularly for a mix of intellectual tête-à-tête and spiritual counsel, and is gradually drawn back to the Church—but mixed in with her spiritual attraction to the Church is a romantic attraction to the man.
This, combined with subplots about the experience of wartime France, is the premise of the 1961 film Léon Morin, Priest, and it may on first summary sound like the sort of sensational and irreverent story no Catholic wants to touch with a ten-foot pole. But Fr. Morin does not break his vows. Instead, this is one of the best priest movies ever made, a realistic, tasteful (and not excessively cringe-inducing) treatment of a real problem that arises in priestly life. From the priest’s point of view, it’s a thought-provoking study of pastoral prudence; from the female protagonist’s point of view, it deals with the necessity of gradually purifying one’s motives in the course of conversion
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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

Thomas and James discuss two classic Hollywood films dealing with the moral problems of overweening ambition - specifically in the context of show business. All About Eve (1950), which won six Oscars and features razor-sharp dialogue and an unforgettable performance by Bette Davis, is set in the world of the theater, while The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) is a (perhaps more honest) self-examination of Hollywood itself. The latter contains the more perceptive observations of artistic genius and its operations, which tend to subordinate everything to the work to be done. More broadly, it's a study of leadership, in both its positive and its more self-serving forms.
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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

Continuing our trek through the filmography of Terrence Malick, the world's greatest living Christian filmmaker, we arrive at The Thin Red Line (featuring Jim Caviezel in his breakthrough role). This film came in 1998 after Malick's twenty-year hiatus from directing movies, after which he never took such a long break again.
Focused on the experiences of U.S. soldiers during the battle for Guadalcanal during World War II, The Thin Red Line is remarkable in that it features all the poetry, interiority, and dreamy aesthetics we have come to expect from Malick, while still being, in Nathan Douglas's words, "a fully functioning war movie" - conveying the physical chaos as well as the psychological sufferings and moral challenges of war - challenges of leadership, sacrifice, compassion for one's enemies, and how to meet one's death with calm and dignity.
The Thin Red Line is arguably Malick's first masterpiece - and his first film focused on metaphysical themes, or as James Majewski says, a "preamble" to the more explicit Christian faith found in his later work, using voiceover extensively to ask questions about the origins of good and evil, the unity of human experience, and most of all, how one can maintain faith in the transcendent in the midst of evil, ugliness and disorder.
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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

There are many ways to make a movie. Only a few of those ways fit within the Hollywood mold. We believe that rather than taking pop culture as their sole model, Catholics and Catholic filmmakers should be open to a wide variety of artistic approaches. Thus, in this episode James and Thomas discuss the early career of the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who came up with an approach to filmmaking that is not just different from Hollywood, but different from anyone else in world cinema.
Kiarostami spent the first two decades of his career working for the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Tehran, making a plethora of fascinating movies either for or about children (fiction, documentary, and educational). In addition to exploring his concerns with childhood and education, he developed a great ability to direct non-professional actors and this allowed him to blur the line between documentary and fiction in his later films - or, perhaps, just to be honest about how human behavior is affected by the presence of a camera, even in a documentary setting.
If you only watch one of the films discussed in this episode, you might pick his 1987 feature Where Is the Friend’s Home?, an beautifully simple story about childhood, friendship and conscience. Through its patient attention to detail, this film allows us to rediscover a child’s-eye perspective on the world.
Where Is the Friend’s Home? is the first in a sort of trilogy of films Kiarostami shot in the region of Koker in northern Iran. That first installment, while one of his best works, is not actually typical of the unique style he developed soon after, which can be seen even within the trilogy itself. The simplicity of the first story is succeeded by two films that take on multiple perspectives and blur the line between fiction and real life. In a word, things get meta.
In the second film, …And Life Goes On, the director of the first film (played by an actor, not the real director) and his young son search for the two boys who acted in the first film, after the Koker region was devastated by a real-life earthquake that killed 50,000 people. Investigating real-life events through a fictional road trip, we get a new perspective on the simple fictional perspective of the first movie.
The third film, Through the Olive Trees, gets very complex (but in a most entertaining way). While shooting a scene in the second film, Kiarostami noticed some tension between the two young actors playing a married couple. So he invented a love story about these two actors, and the third film is about this story that takes place while that scene from the second film was being shot. Shot, we should add, by a director who is directing scenes involving the character of the “director” from the 2nd film – so we have two different actors playing directors, both of which represent the real director, Kiarostami. As avant-garde as this sounds, it’s a highly entertaining story that never could have been done as well by a director hewing to commercial instincts.
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You may be surprised to hear that one of the more morally profound new movies we’ve seen recently is a Godzilla reboot! The original 1954 Godzilla had its own ideas, being a way of processing Japan’s nuclear trauma and the ethical implications of superweapons. But the new Godzilla Minus One goes even deeper, examining not only the trauma of the war but the psychological and spiritual fallout of a culture that produced the kamikaze phenomenon. The film confronts the culture of death that dominated WWII-era Japan and its corruption of the idea of self-sacrifice, and shows how our sacrifices in war should be rightly ordered to preserving the value of human life rather than seeking a heroic death for its own sake.
Visual artist Erin McAtee, co-founder of the Catholic arts organization Arthouse2B, joins to discuss the themes of the film as well as the director’s choice to produce a black-and-white version.
00:00 Intro
06:15 Black-and-white version
14:18 Story and themes 
Links
Godsplaining episode featuring James Majewski and Erin McAtee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kimE7ob1QKY&ab_channel=Godsplaining%7CCatholicPodcast
Erin K. McAtee https://www.erinkmcatee.com/
Arthouse2B https://www.arthouse2b.org/
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Widely considered one of the greatest films ever made, Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story is a quiet, gentle yet tragic family drama about the distance that can grow between elderly parents and their adult children. It's a critique of the transformation of culture and mores in postwar Japan, particularly the loss of filial piety, but it's not just specific to Japanese culture. The film holds a mirror up to both parents and children, and if it is critical of those who fail to honor and love their elderly parents, it also shows that this is often a result of the parents having failed their children when they were younger. Tokyo Story should provoke an examination of conscience in viewers of every generation.
Irish Catholic multimedia commentator Ruadhan Jones returns to the podcast to discuss this canonical work of Japanese cinema.
Links
Ruadhan Jones links https://linktr.ee/ruadhanjones
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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com