Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Mubz From acclaimed documentarian Alex Gibney, comes a potent examination of the history of sex abuse and paedophilia within the Catholic Church. Told through the eyes of victims, Gibney follows the murky trail of sex abuse from Wisconsin all the way up to the Vatican.This is not for the faint hearted or easily disturbed. That we may understand the term 'documentary', speaks volumes of how successfully Gibney has reinvented the genre, creating something that is as much horror as it is non-fiction. We are plunged into the dark recesses of traumatic experience, and exposed to the sheer scope of institutionalised child molestation. Revelation after revelation, horror after horror, we witness very real and powerful emotion on screen, producing a 'documentary' that enthrals and terrifies.The inclusion of Terry, Arthur and Gary, 3 victims integral to the first known case of protest against clerical sex abuse in the US, is a genuine masterstroke. This level of realism is perhaps expected of the documentary format, however, Gibney's overall production results in something much more effective. From confession-booth like interviews to complex animated graphics, Mea Maxima Culpa is educational yet highly creative. Aside from the cinematographic merits and qualities of story-telling, significant effort is made to defrock hidden truths of organised child molestation and the lengths taken to cover it up. The trail from the pulpits of Milwaukee to the highest echelons of the Vatican is made to seem more concrete than ever before.Verdict: Expertly constructed and magnificently told, Mea disturbs ones very core. Gibney has exquisitely created an amalgam of documentary and horror with a profound respect to the stories of its protagonists. Prepare to be infuriated, terrified and astounded without rest. Essential viewing.

Andy Steel If Dan Brown had written a novel about a cover-up in the Catholic Church on the scale depicted in this film, it would be treated as a great work of fiction. The trouble is, it's all true and that's the most shocking thing about it. It is a very well made film that has a compelling flow to the narrative and this is helped with some nicely chosen musical backdrops. The only thing that lets it down is a lack of balance, but then, as it says in the film, the Vatican refused to be interviewed for this film. Not that they could have put up any defence. I found it a gripping watch that did get a little emotional at times. Well worth a look whatever religion (or not) you are.SteelMonster's verdict: HIGHLY RECOMMENDEDMy score: 8.8/10You can find an expanded version of this review on my blog: Thoughts of a SteelMonster.

Frances Farmer This film does a fine job of documenting the groundbreaking, courageous and tenacious efforts of a group of deaf men to expose a pedophile priest who ran a school for deaf children and preyed on those children for many years.The nature of the crimes and the pervasive lack of action by the catholic church to discipline the criminal priest and aid his victims is truly disgusting. Similar circumstances in Ireland are also reviewed where priests were well known to have abused children in their churches and yet they were never appropriately disciplined either by the church or turned over by the church to the civil authorities. It is extremely important that these heinous crimes and the institutional resistance in the church to deal with them are made known by films such as this one. The story of how these men who courageously pursued their search for justice prevailed despite tremendous church inaction and resistance is inspiring.My only quibble with the film is when it uses contemporary dramatizations to give viewers a feeling for what it would have been like to have been a child in these environments. These are not so much dramatic re-enactments as brief glimpses very much at the periphery of the actual abuse. Still, I thought they were unnecessary as the testimony and documentary footage provided ample information and were more than enough to make my blood boil.Do see this film and support it for the important work it does in exposing a very serious abuse of trust by an institution of tremendous power that still doggedly refuses to hold itself accountable for so many horrendous crimes.

MediaboyMusings After looking at the world of NHL pugilists in last year's outstanding The Last Gladiators, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God finds director Alex Gibney returning to investigating abuses of power, a theme that has served him well in past efforts like Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room and the Oscar-winning Taxi To The Dark Side. This disturbing exposé on the problem of child and youth sexual abuse in the Catholic Church focuses partly on the stories of five deaf men who are thought to be the first individuals to ever publicly protest abuses by clergy in the United States, after they were victimized by Father Lawrence Murphy at St. John's School for the Deaf in the suburbs of Milwaukee during the 60s and 70s. Gibney also takes a broader view of the subject by looking at other cases of clergy abuse (notably in Ireland) and the systematic cover-ups of these crimes by the Catholic Church's top officials, whose unofficial policy on the matter is to "deny, minimize, and blame", according to one journalist interviewed. "Mea Maxima Culpa's" Latin translation is "my most grievous fault".Although the five St. John's victims have been working for over three decades to call attention to the issue and seek justice for their suffering, their story gained traction after New York Times writer Laurie Goodstein wrote an article in 2010 about the Vatican's failure to defrock Murphy, despite the fact that they were presented with undeniable evidence of his crimes and received strong warnings from some American church officials. Murphy is believed to have molested over 200 boys at the boarding school from the 50s until 1974, when he was transferred to another parish. The Vatican was alerted of Murphy's behaviour in 1963 and did nothing. Actors Jamey Sheridan, Chris Cooper, Ethan Hawke, and John Slattery give voice to the victims, who use sign language with punctuated hand slaps to express the horrors they endured at the hand of Murphy and the shame that followed. Murphy's textbook predatory behaviour found him singling out what he perceived as the weaker students and further exploiting the fact that they faced an obvious barrier in communicating over the phone with their families. Three of the victims, including Terry Kohut, who sued the Catholic Church and named the current Pope in his lawsuit, were on hand for the world premiere TIFF screening I attended and gave their emotional reaction to it afterwards at the Q & A through a sign language interpreter. Just knowing that they were in the audience and reliving their pain while seeing the finished film for the first time added an extra significance and weight to the proceedings.The investigations resulting from the Kohut lawsuit ended up leading to the discovery of secret Vatican documents that detailed many instances of sexual abuse cover-ups that reach to the highest levels of the Catholic Church, with Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) substantially implicated. In the years before being anointed Pope, Ratzinger oversaw a Vatican council that monitored sexual abuse cases in the Church, so his post-anointment claims of being unaware of most of what was occurring seem highly unlikely. How his and his predecessor's culpability and mishandling of these tragic cases hasn't been a much larger media story is difficult to understand.That aside, overall media coverage of child and youth sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has, sadly, become an all-too-familiar story that one almost becomes numb to. Gibney rises to the challenge of presenting a fresh take on a much-discussed important subject with this well-researched and powerful film. My only real negative about it are the re-enactments that Gibney employs, even if they are artfully composed and beautifully shot, using plenty of religious imagery. Re-enactments are a staple of Gibney's work (not to mention Errol Morris'), but the stories he tells are usually compelling enough and, in my opinion, the end results are slightly diminished with this gimmicky device that feels like an imagination crutch for the audience.