The Academy Awards are coming up March 12th, so we wanted to recommend a couple of Oscar-nominated movies that fans of the podcast might enjoy. And there was one person host Mike Jordan Laskey was hoping to interview for this episode: his favorite film critic of all time, Alissa Wilkinson from the website Vox, where she’s the senior culture writer.

Nobody writes on the intersections of cinema and theology and spirituality like Alissa does. Over and over again, she finds angles that no other critics see. Alissa writes essays that are profound, funny, moving, and eminently readable. She joined Mike to talk about two Best Picture nominees: “Women Talking” and “The Banshees of Inisherin.”

Alissa talked about both films and what makes them especially compelling for a Catholic audience. She also discussed what goes into the art of criticism more broadly, and what she thinks about the current trend of religious communities depicted on the big screen.

Alissa on "Women Talking": https://www.vox.com/culture/23345084/women-talking-review-tiff-augustine

Alissa on "The Banshees of Inisherin": https://www.vox.com/culture/23413305/banshees-inisherin-review-history-civil-war

Alissa's newsletter: https://wilkinson.substack.com/

AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States.

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