Donn Fendler’s story is recounted in the restrained dramatization “Lost on a Mountain in Maine” (Blue Fox). Though the lad’s experience was a harrowing one, this look back at it is ultimately a life-affirming tale about the power of perseverance.

Catholic Review Editor Christopher Gunty talks with Holy Cross Father David Guffey, national director and head of production at Family Theater Productions about the work it produces, and about a new film that will begin airing in November on PBS stations, “Playing Like a Girl: The House that Rob Built.”

A filmmaker and graduate of Miami Catholic schools with a new documentary film about Guatemalan-Mayan immigration to the U.S. said her project brought clarity to her own immigrant history as a Venezuelan American.

Beneath the nation’s fascination with horror films — which translates into a multibillion-dollar industry — lurks a hidden quest for the divine, a theologian with expertise on the genre told OSV News.

Jessica Navin, spiritual formation coordinator for the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS), did not have a sainthood-cause documentary in mind when she began work as executive producer on what would become “Radiating Joy: The Michelle Duppong Story.”

Catholic viewers will naturally be interested in a TV show that features a nun as one of its principal characters. In the case of “Grotesquerie,” however, they’ll tune in, to use an obsolete term, only to be turned off — both by a welter of gore and by a treatment of the church that degenerates from mere ignorance to outright hostility.

Capsule reviews of theatrical movies available now for streaming or scheduled for broadcast on network or cable television as well as notes on TV programming for the same week.

There’s much to like and even admire in the animated biography “Piece by Piece” (Focus). Most significantly, as a Lego version of singer, songwriter and music producer Pharrell Williams explores his past via an extended interview with director and co-writer Morgan Neville, the film highlights its subject’s Christian faith.

A serious, even lugubrious, tone and a top-flight cast add heft to the ecclesiastical melodrama “Conclave” (Focus). Yet the film is fundamentally a power-struggle potboiler kept roiling by attention-grabbing plot developments — the last and most significant of which Catholic viewers will likely find uncomfortable at best.

As scripted by Mark Bomback, “White Bird” effectively tugs at the heart by showcasing altruistic heroism in the face of dire evil.