100 More Movies Every Catholic Should See: The Next List

An exciting sequel, a new organization system, and a word of caution

Our initial list of 100 Movies Every Catholic Should See is completed, but as we were coming to a close we knew there were far more movies we wanted to highlight on this blog. The 130-year history of cinema is so rich with excellent stories and beautiful artistic works that we are eager to start a new list and share them with you. With such an unprecedented access to cinema of every genre and era, it can be overwhelming to try and dredge through the schlock to find excellent films to watch. We here at 100 Movies Every Catholic Should See hope that we can continue to provide a collection of such gems for your edification and enrichment.

We have decided to organize this list a little bit differently from the first one. That list was more or less compiled as we went, allowing all of our writers to pitch films that they believed should be on the list, choosing the best of them, and writing essays as the inspiration (and availability) hit us. This time around, we are going to organize our list into small, 5 essay miniseries covering a particular genre, theme, or filmmaker, giving us the ability to go deeper into certain topics in a more coherent way than our gloriously chaotic original list. Our first miniseries will cover the films of the great Irish-American Catholic filmmaker (and Knight of Columbus) John Ford, one of the most decorated and influential filmmakers of all time. His films are chock-full of beautiful imagery, intriguing stories, and thematic elements that are clearly influenced by his Catholic worldview, so we are very excited to kick off our new list with his work!

A quick word of caution to do with this second list: we attempted (with a couple of exceptions) to pick films for the first list that were relatively clean, especially when it came to sexual imagery/topics. We are all very much against pornographic imagery or sexual immorality portrayed as good or even neutral in films, and we tried to choose movies that reflect perennial Church teaching on this subject. We are still committed to this principle, and will not recommend a film which we feel compromises morality. However, there are some films with excellent Catholic themes that we would very much like to recommend, but which have one or two “sex scenes” or some shocking and disturbing violence or significant vulgar and blasphemous language. Films that come to mind immediately are films like Braveheart, which has a couple sex scenes, or the filmography of Eric Rohmer, which often deals with sexuality but espouses Catholic moral teaching, or The Exorcist, which has deeply disturbing imagery. We are going to be a bit more willing to put such films on this second list, since we believe there is value in them even if a good Catholic might need to use VidAngel filters or keep a finger on the fast forward button. We will be sure to include content warnings in such cases so that our readers will always be aware of what they are getting into, and we hope we can have productive discussions about the good of these films while leaving the bad bits behind.

We are very excited about this new venture and we hope that you all are too! There are lots of great movies out there still to share, and we hope to continue bringing you high-quality Catholic film criticism every week. If you enjoy this project, please subscribe and share to keep spreading the word to other Catholic cinephiles! We’ve seen the project bear great fruit so far and we hope it continues to edify and inspire you. God bless!