Reviews of the Top 10 movies overall and seven of the best family films of 2021 as selected by the Media Review Office of Catholic News Service.
Arts & Culture
Teen’s award-winning musical talents on display at monastery organ recital
The sounds of a Bach fugue and several other musical works filled the sacred space of the church at the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in Washington’s Brookland neighborhood as Gabriel Galdo played the monastery’s Lively-Fulcher organ.
From slave to portraiture artist
Johnson is an important figure in early federal and late colonial American portraiture art, Fulco said, whose story shows the increasing contributions of African Americans to American society in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Beauty born of pain: Black Catholic artist sees art as means of healing
For Scott, art is a way to cope with the challenges of life. In his hands, the medium of clay becomes an instrument of healing.
Identification of painting as 17th-century masterwork brings joy to parish
A parish in a neighborhood that once had the highest concentration of COVID-19 cases in the country has found new joy in the discovery that a familiar painting over the transept doorway of its church is a 17th-century masterpiece.
Architect turns 67,000 tiny LEGO pieces into Vatican City State replica
Working quietly in his Chicago-area home during the lull of the pandemic in 2020, Buttliere cobbled together 67,000 tiny, plastic LEGO pieces to create an improbably realistic 3D replica of Vatican City State.
British Museum exhibit on St. Thomas Becket gives sympathetic look at past
In a gallery of The British Museum, light plays on an array of medieval crosses, reliquaries and manuscripts, as an audiovisual display reenacts one of English history’s most notorious crimes.
Team crafts roof truss that could help guide rebuilding of Paris cathedral
The world watched in shock in April 2019 as flames devoured Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
Into the deep: Scuba-diving faithful honor Christ underwater
The statue, located offshore halfway between the small coastal villages of Camogli and Portofino, was the first known statue of Christ to be placed in the sea as a sign of his peace and protection for those who live, work or play by the water, to be a place of prayer and to commemorate those who have died there.
Iconic Dorothy dress has been there ‘all along’ at Catholic University
It turns out there really is no place like home for a prized piece of movie memorabilia that came to The Catholic University of America’s drama department about 50 years ago.
Sponsor a gargoyle: New fundraiser launched for Notre Dame in Paris
A novel fundraising approach to restore one of the most iconic monuments in the world, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, enables donors to have a piece of history.
Graduate program aims to reverse decline seen in Catholic art, literature
“Our aim is to serve and inspire the ongoing revival of Catholic letters in our time,” said co-founder James Matthew Wilson, outgoing professor of humanities at Villanova University near Philadelphia.