Carl Curtis, Author at Catholic Herald

Carl Curtis

ZeroZeroZero: A film greater than the sum of its name

April 09, 2020

ZeroZeroZero may be aptly named if the title points to the resulting good in the worlds it so bleakly depicts: those of Italian organised crime and Mexican drug cartels. The action begins near Reggio Calabria where an ageing crime boss Don Minu La Piana (Adriano Chiaramida, pictured) proposes to unify rival families, which, as he

Sigmund Freud meets Sherlock Holmes

March 26, 2020

The Third Man begins with a world-weary narrator declaring, “I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss waltzes, its glamour and easy charm.” He means it too. But if you long for the old Vienna, then Vienna Blood may be the ticket. It has Strauss waltzes, glamour and easy charm …

A masterful mystery with a dead llama

March 05, 2020

The Stranger (Netflix Originals) opens with Adam Price (Richard Armitage) taking one of his two boys to a football match only to find that dads are expected to participate. Play he does, and when the game’s over, he steps into the club bar for a beer. Before long, a woman (Hannah John-Kamen) wearing a baseball

Sanditon: An insufferable take on Austen’s unfinished novel

February 20, 2020

Sanditon, now airing on PBS and available on DVD in Britain, is based on Jane Austen’s unfinished novel of 1816-1817. “Unfinished” creates the impression of a novel lacking perhaps only a conclusion – a somewhat generous assumption. A few hours’ reading from the Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen gives the lie to that belief. Sanditon runs

The Aeronauts is baloney – but it’s thrilling to watch

January 16, 2020

On my last trip to London, I visited St Paul’s and ascended the 528 steps to the Golden Gallery, 280 feet from the cathedral floor. It took my breath away and, truth be told, scared me half to death. The Aeronauts, on Amazon Prime, tells the story of meteorologist James Glaisher and aeronaut (ie balloonist)

Critics disdain this little movie – but they’re wrong

January 09, 2020

Ashes in the Snow (Amazon Prime) is a little movie, but “little” doesn’t mean small. Ashes focuses on the personal trials of an adolescent girl, Lina Vilkas (Bel Powley), amid the shattering events of World War II. The film opens in Kaunas, Lithuania, 1941, with Lina, a self-taught artist who dreams of art school but

How saints saved a crumbling civilisation

January 02, 2020

I’d be lying if I said there weren’t any new Christmas movies airing right now; in truth, I tried a couple, but couldn’t get very far with either. There was a whiff of the Hallmark Channel about both of them: too much formula and too little substance. One could do worse, but one could also

Herald Top 10: Carl Curtis: Good Omens is a travesty of eschatology

December 28, 2019

Good Omens on Amazon Prime is a five and one-half hour exercise in schoolboy humour, that is, a brand of humour practised by witty adolescents – not an easy thing to pull off either. Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett, Good Omens does indeed howl away nicely for much

An absorbing twist on the police drama

November 14, 2019

Criminal: UK (Netflix) might sound boring to some potential viewers. Take into consideration these details from episodes one and two. It has three sets: an interrogation room, a room in which others watch from behind a see-through mirror and tape the interrogation, and a hallway outside both rooms. Not much. But inside those rooms two

Sacha Baron Cohen is superb in this tense thriller

October 17, 2019

It’s ironic that many series on television today are rated “MA” (mature audiences), when realistically they should be labelled “AA”, for adolescent audiences – or adolescent minds. Consider the gratuitous sex and explicit language (which would once have earned films an “X” rating) of Peaky Blinders, The Last Czars and Carnival Row. Aren’t such shows

War and peace in faerieland

October 03, 2019

Carnival Row (Amazon Prime drama series) opens with a prologue, as a tale of strange places, peoples and creatures must. It’s spoken by Vignette Stonemoss (Cara Delevingne): “For generations we thrived peacefully in a land called Tirnanoc. We are fawns, trolls, centaurs and the stewards of riches and secrets your people will never know. We

Have Christians taken over DC? A Netflix documentary thinks so

September 05, 2019

As Netflix Originals’ The Family tells it, the National Prayer Breakfast held annually in Washington, DC, is the brainchild of a decades-old organisation called The Family, which is really a cabal bent on destroying the constitutional separation of Church and state. And, declares Jeff Sharlet, author of the book from which the documentary series takes

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