The late Pope John Paul II is brought to life with the DVD release of the two-part mini-series aired on CBC this past summer, entitled Karol, A Man Who Became Pope and Karol: The Pope, The Man.

{mosimage}The most important information in the bookends of the Bible, Genesis and Apocalypse, is the stuff that tells us who we are. Identity is one of the most deeply religious questions we can ask.

{mosimage}The worst thing you can say about a religion is that it is a self-imposed prison of the mind — an identity of limits that deforms the human soul.

{mosimage}The telling moment in The Yes Men comes at the three-quarter mark when intrepid pranksters Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno engage in a wistful meditation on satire.

{mosimage}We ask God not to lead us into temptation because temptation is real. If Jesus had to face it in His 40 days in the desert, then there's no reason to believe any of us will be spared such a quintessentially human experience.

{mosimage}There's no reason to think a movie that moves so much you may need Gravol with your popcorn is necessarily a good thing, but The Bourne Supremacy is a much better wild ride than you might expect from an action movie sequel whose title seems aimed at 13-year-old wrestling fans.

Underneath the juvenile title is a very adult film that uses the paranoid's paradise conceit of the international thriller genre to probe questions of identity, sin and redemption.

Matt Damon again plays Jason Bourne, a young soldier brainwashed by an ultra secret arm of the CIA to be the American government's assassin. When we last saw him in The Bourne Identity, he had woken up with amnesia and the instincts of a very efficient killer.

{mosimage}Contrary to rumours carried by the better class of newspaper, western movies are not dead and will not die. The west, the frontier, the endless sky, the open plain, the man on horseback, the pistol, the rifle, the Indian, the settler, the rancher and the farmer have a claim on the American imagination because they're there in American history.

Or, never mind the history. Director Ron Howard's new movie demonstrates that the beautiful landscape of mountains and plains is still beautiful - still the best backdrop a movie could ever hope for.

{mosimage}For those who found the Lord of the Rings trilogy a tad bombastic and perhaps simplistic in its fairyland reduction of the forces of light and forces of darkness into two massively clashing armies, now there’s an alternative — from Russia, with love.

When Hieronymus Bosch painted hell in the 15th century it was shocking, thrilling and repulsive. The same was true of the 2002 British horror movie 28 Days Later.

TORONTO - To discover the meaning of forgiveness, film maker Johanna Lunn had to consider the nature of evil.

“In the course of making the film, I really had to ask myself, ‘What is evil?’ I’m forever, eternally an optimist and would maybe secretly like to believe that evil doesn’t exist,” Lunn told The Catholic Register before Forgiveness: Stories for Our Time was to premiere in Toronto’s annual Hot Docs Festival in late April. The film will be shown on CTV May 26.