This is the first of a weekly series from Anthony Esolen giving his top ten films in different categories. Readers are invited to give their own choices on the Catholic Herald‘s Facebook page. You are also invited to suggest topics for future lists.   Hollywood (and the English cinema) used to make a lot of

Beth Harmon is profoundly wounded from being rejected by her parents and by others who should have loved and accepted her. The orphaned chess prodigy who is the subject of Netflix’s new original series, The Queen’s Gambit, turns to drugs and alcohol not only to cope, but to play chess and win.

We are living in the golden age of the papal film. On Sunday night, The Two Popes, a movie starring Jonathan Pryce as Pope Francis and Anthony Hopkins as Benedict XVI, competed for three Academy Awards. Ultimately, it was overlooked in all three categories: best actor (Pryce), best supporting actor (Hopkins) and best adapted screenplay.

“Coming out” used to mean attending a debutante’s ball. Nowadays, as we know, it means a person announcing that their sexual orientation is gay or “non binary”. The television presenter Phillip Schofield has taken the ceremony of “coming out” one step further – by making the announcement on live television. He has been hailed as

Something missing from Little Women Little Women was one of last year’s most acclaimed films. But, wrote Charlotte Allen in the Wall Street Journal, the film misses one of the key themes of Louisa May Alcott’s original novel: namely, religion. The novel was a spiritual journey in which each of the March sisters struggles with

South Korean director Bong Joon-ho is a devotee of Ken Loach, the British socialist director, and it shows. In Parasite, he uses a parable to explore the socio-economic malaise that pervades our postmodern societies. The story has resonated with audiences globally: it won the 2019 Palme d’Or and is the first non-English language movie to

The director gave interviews to Jesuit publications ahead of the release of his new film about missionary priests in 17th century Japan

The Pope has reportedly agreed to appear as himself in family movie, Beyond the Sun