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The Ultimate Gift is one of the earliest releases from the Fox Faith department, announced at the end of 2006, for the release of faith-based films. This one is more accessible to the wide audience as it does not wear its faith credentials on its sleeve (as, for instance, in the Baptist-church produced Facing the Giants which has an explicit, almost proselytising screenplay). |
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Su Rynard is a Canadian documentary maker and video artist. This is her first feature film. It is a moving experience. |
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Patrons wandering into The Good German unprepared might be taken aback, thinking that they had come into a retrospective of Hollywood 40s films by mistake. They would see the standard box size screen, black and white photography, hear a swelling Warner Bros old time score and notice the costumes and hair styles of the period. |
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A preface to this review: some years ago I was invited to be part of a panel discussion; the theme was ‘What can Protestants learn from Catholics about film and what can Catholics learn from Protestants?’ |
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Shawn Slovo, daughter of the anti-apartheid activists Joe Slovo and Ruth First, wrote the award-winning film, A World Apart, which was released in 1988, a memoir of her girlhood when her mother was in prison. |
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An Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language film of 2006. |
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This is a sombre piece of work, a glimpse into an even more sombre world. This is a small country town in Northern Ireland in the 1950s, Middletown. It is atmospherically filmed in dark tones and colours. |
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Every so often a film appears (usually from the United States, although the Mad Max series from Australia had a worldwide impact in the 1980s) that gets the popular commentators talking about the links between spirituality, religion and cinema. It happened in the late 1990s with The Matrix. |
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Bamako provides quite a demanding challenge to its audiences. |
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Luc Besson is better known for his science-fantasy films of the past like Subway, The Last Battle or The Fifth Element and for his recent producing role in a collection of violent actioners like the Taxi series, Unleashed and the 13th District. To find him making a children’s film, a blend of live action and animation comes as something of a surprise. |
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 Before the Academy Awards starts, Habitus is presenting you some of the movies that are expected to win. Father Peter Malone is analyzing the movies within a Christian spectrum, that deal with religious and existential topics. Take a look inside and find out more information about films like:
3 Needles Dreamgirls Freedom Writers The Last King of Scotland Letters From Iwo Jima Scoop Zwartboek (Black Book) Welcome to Dongmakgol
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A big-budget Korean war film that is strongly anti-war. It combines realism (especially in the combat sequences and the troops stranded in the mountains trying to survive) with touches of the fey and magic realism. |
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 Director Paul Verhoeven made his name in his native Holland with such films as Turks Fruit, Spetters, The Fourth Man. He then went to the United States in the 1980s and made a number of significant films – in a rather in-your-face Dutch style: RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Star Troupers.
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 It was Evelyn Waugh who wrote the celebrated satire on journalism, Scoop. But, this is not a film version of Waugh’s novel, even though some of the characters here could well have populated it. |
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 Letters from Iwo Jima has been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar and Clint Eastwood has been nominated for Best Director. It is an extraordinary film both in conception and execution. It is, as a website commentator remarked, a film that the Japanese should have made. |
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 So far, Forest Whitaker has won all the Best Actor awards for his performance as Idi Amin. It is quite an impressive feat of impersonation and acting.
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Nick Broomfield has been making hard-hitting, insightful and controversial documentaries since the 1970s. They include a range of topics, although they tend to focus on significant personalities. |
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 This is a must for educators. |
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 There are not very many movie musicals these days. Chicago was a big hit four years ago. Then there was the screen version of The Producers but not much else. Now there is Dreamgirls. |
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 A film about the spread of AIDS and the social, medical and religious challenges it offers. It is made up of three separate stories (though with a unifying voiceover by Olympia Dukakis) from three quite diverse parts of the world, reminding us of the global culture that cuts across boundaries.
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Movie reviews 
Habitus is proud to present movie critique from a Christian perspective done by Signis president and a life-time movie lover Fr. Peter Malone MSC.
