Customer Reviews

Sinner

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Beautifully shot, well directed and preformed, with a sincerely dramatic and evocative score. I really enjoyed the journey through this film.

Far superior to the 2008 feature "Doubt" with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffmann, Marc Bernaoudt's "Sinner" is probably one of the best, most profound films to deal with Catholicism that I have ever seen. I'd even rank it up there with Bressons' "Diary of a Country Priest" in terms of passion and clarity.

This film takes place in the wake of the sex scandals that plagued the Church in 1991. Nick Chundlund ("Training Day", "Con Air") plays the saintly Father Anthony Romano, who is perhaps the opposite of how most Catholic priests are portrayed in contemporary film--he is more like Peck's priest in "The Keys of the Kingdom" than Linus Roaches' anguished, contradiction riddled padre in 1994's "Priest"

A surreal tour de force with very little cliche or backing off from the cruel realities of the world both inside and outside the rectory, Romano is a gentle man with a few secrets and a golfing buddy who helps him "use his muscle memory" played in top form by Brad Dourif, the Church's groundskeeper. He has the misfortune to be paired with a clearly mentally disturbed fellow priest (Michael E. Rodgers in a genuinely frightening role) a fundamentalist who despises Romano for being a "Vatican II liberal who panders to any little qualm the parishoners have"--all this while he is bailing the guy out of jail for assaulting a prostitute played by Georgina Cates.

This prostitute, Lil, focuses her sights on Catholic priests--attempting to get them to violate their celibacy and then using blackmail as her ruse to empty their pockets. She is a lost, desperate soul, and takes Romano hostage after the incident (which is never explained fully) with his nutjob priest in arms.

A lot is explored here, perhaps with more earnestness than I have yet seen (and without the malicious, reactionary cynicism) of most movies about the Catholic Church in contemporary times. Everyone does a wonderful job but the highlight is really Romano--a man in whom Christ has truly put on His "new man". The dialogue between Romano and Lil is priceless.

I'd recommend this film particularly to lapsed Catholics trying to make sense of their faith in the contemporary world. A masterpiece.

Great, behind the scenes, depiction of a priest's lonely, emotionally conflicted life in a small parish. Well acted, realistic dialogue. An engaging, riveting drama with a shocker of a surprise ending. I was brought up Catholic and this story rang loud and true. Andrij

Thoughtful and cerebral film from a first-time feature director that makes the viewer really think about values of love and sin. Multi-award wins at film festivals across the country, this is not to be missed and an important film for those that muse about religious guilt.

So a cool, liberal priest hides a thoroughly vile prostitute from the police and travels around with her hearing about her woeful life. The Jewish director and ex-Catholic, New Age scriptwriter have tried to portray this as a film about "redemption", which they claim is actually very complimentary to the Catholic Faith and its priesthood. What a joke. This is another in a long line of anti-Catholic hate films. It portrays the traditional, faithful priest as a malicious, twisted pervert. It portrays the modern, skeptical, foul-mouthed priest as the heroic protagonist, who one night drunkenly hits golf balls at the statues and stained glass windows inside his own church, while excoriating the Catholic Church for a history of "intolerance', genocide, rape". In the worldview of these movies, the only good priest is the secular humanist one, who nurtures doubt, resentment and dissent. These films present religion as an absurd archaism, more often bad than good, but a universal human foible which can perhaps be exploited to good ends if the supernatural is reduced to its barest minimum, and the therapeutic aspects elevated to its raison d'etre. This is a scummy movie which soils the Sacred and insults the faithful.

I didn't quite understand half of the things taking place during Sinner. You had a blind Catholic priest and a prostitute who come into contact with each other, and apparently the prostitute had a troubled past with either a previous priest, or just another man. I was never sure.

Either way, the prostitute is apparently extremely bitter about something, and this takes place for the first half of the movie. She basically bosses the priest around, tells him what to do and how to do it, etc. In other words, she acts completely angry ALL the time whenever she's around him.

I don't think I understood how the prostitute stumbled upon the priest, or whether that was intentional or what. This storyline is quite a confusing one to follow unless you know religion really well. That's something I don't know anything about.

Eventually we learn the priest is blind, and if there's any moral to this storyline it's that you can take the angriest, most ungrateful person in the entire world and make them understand the religious way of life with a LOT of patience and tolerance. I guess that's the moral of the film. If not, I don't get it.

Either way, this storyline is confusing, complicated, and just sophisticated that not just *anyone* can sit back and enjoy it. Having an understanding of priests and religion probably helps in understanding the words these characters are using.