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| STIGMATA (1999) - R
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ReviewScore: 29 out of 100
SBD Star Rating:
by Lew Irwin
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Some of the reviews for Stigmata read as if they were written for the conservative Catholic League, which has already denounced it as an attack on the Catholic Church. Consider this appraisal from New York Times critic Stephen Holden: "Just in time for Armageddon, Y2K, or the cataclysm of your choice comes Stigmata, a silly, roiling melange of special effects and overheated religious symbolism that at first seems to be about the Second Coming but turns out to be a half-baked anticlerical screed involving Vatican politics." Or consider these comments from Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post: "[Stigmata] turns out to be a vicious anti-Catholic diatribe disguised as an audition tape for MTV. The young director Rupert Wainwright clearly hopes this gets him a Madonna vid, and that's why he pulls out all the stops. Watching it is like sticking your head inside a pipe organ while somebody plays a Bach fugue really loud." Joining the choir is Rod Dreher in the New York Post: "For a movie based on a Catholic mystical phenomenon -- the film even appropriates the legacy of the beatified stigmatic Padre Pio in its plotting and promotion -- Stigmata is jaw-droppingly anti-Catholic. These filmmakers have some nerve, implicating the beloved Italian friar in such a low, dishonest and despicable assault on the Catholic faith." And finally, Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News says that he figures that the message of Stigmata "is that the Catholic Church is a fraud, and that the Vatican knows something it doesn't want Catholics to know." |
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