Pope Leo recently gave a talk to people in the filmmaking industry about the importance of their art. The talk received rapturous reviews, with several critics elevating the pope’s words.

There is an irony here. Pope Leo’s words revealed what’s wrong with modern movies. They are no longer literate. Film is, of course, a visual medium, but the best movies, the ones that stay with us, have always been the ones that are well-written. As literacy declines, so do our films.

Hollywood’s current problems of being artistically incapable of moving beyond superhero reruns or wokeness are the not-so-subtle targets of the pope’s intelligent and poetic words. Read the first three paragraphs of the pope’s talk and imagine a great actor, say Jimmy Stewart or Meryl Streep, delivering them.

Although cinema is now over a century old, it is still a young, dreamlike and somewhat restless art form. It will soon celebrate its 130^th anniversary, counting from the first public screening by the Lumiere brothers in Paris on 28 December 1895. From the outset, cinema was as a play of light and shadow, designed to amuse and impress. However, these visual effects soon succeeded in conveying much deeper realities, eventually becoming an expression of the desire to contemplate and understand life, to recount its greatness and fragility and to portray the longing for infinity.

Dear friends, I am happy to greet and welcome you. I also express my gratitude for what cinema represents: a popular art in the noblest sense, intended for and accessible to all. It is wonderful to see that when the magic light of cinema illuminates the darkness, it simultaneously ignites the eyes of the soul. Indeed, cinema combines what appears to be mere entertainment with the narrative of the human person’s spiritual adventure. One of cinema’s most valuable contributions is helping audiences consider their own lives, look at the complexity of their experiences with new eyes and examine the world as if for the first time. In doing so, they rediscover a portion of the hope that is essential for humanity to live to the fullest. I find comfort in the thought that cinema is not just moving pictures; it sets hope in motion.

Entering a cinema is like crossing a threshold. In the darkness and silence, vision becomes sharper, the heart opens up, and the mind becomes receptive to things not yet imagined. In reality, you know that your art form requires concentration. Through your productions, you connect with people who are looking for entertainment, as well as those who carry within their hearts a sense of restlessness and are looking for meaning, justice and beauty. We live in an age where digital screens are always on. There is a constant flow of information. However, cinema is much more than just a screen; it is an intersection of desires, memories and questions. It is a sensory journey in which light pierces the darkness and words meet silence. As the plot unfolds, our mind is educated, our imagination broadens, and even pain can find new meaning.

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of one of the greatest years in the history of film: 1975. How are we doing in comparison? Let’s take note of the Rotten Tomatoes 2025 Best Movies with their same list for 1975.

2025

On Becoming Guinea Fowl
Eephus
No Other Choice
The Secret Agent
Souleymane’s Story
Deaf President Now!
The Perfect Neighbor
Caught by the Tides
Sister Midnight
Predators

1975

Jaws
Dog Day Afternoon
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Nashville
The Passenger
Three Days of the Condor
Escape to Witch Mountain

I doubt that many Americans reading the 2025 list have even seen one of those movies. Many are foreign films, which serves to emphasize that the educational systems in other countries may be making their citizens more literate than the disaster we call the American school system.

The 1975 list, however, is astonishing—even the blockbusters featured lengthy scenes of complex dialogue that reveal characters who are deeply philosophical. Jaws, the smash hit that ushered in the summer blockbuster era, has long scenes that are nothing but dialogue. George Lucas famously mashed up literature, mythology, and psychology to create Star Wars. Love him or hate him, Woody Allen’s movies are literate. Even a Rodney Dangerfield comedy like Back to School (1986) had a running joke involving the author Kurt Vonnegut.

What movie in in our time could or would make such a reference?

Actually, there are a couple. In 2023 the films Barbie and Oppenheimer did blockbuster business. The joke at the time was that the two movies were huge cultural events despite being totally different. Barbie explores the meaning of a doll. Oppenheimer reveals the mind and soul of Robert Oppenheimer, the man who developed the atomic bomb. Yet Barbie and Oppenheimer shared something in common: neither film is underwritten. Characters are fleshed out, their histories are examined, and philosophical questions are given due time to flower. The only film that made any real money in 2024 is Dune, which is based on a great 1965 novel and is overflowing with ideas.

One of the best books of film criticism I’ve read in years is Cocktails with George and Martha by Philip Gefter. It examines Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the 1966 movie starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The story, based on the 1962 award-winning play, dramatizes a married couple who have grown bitter and exhausted with each other. George and Martha, bickering, backbiting, verbally torturing each other, then ultimately understanding that, for all they have suffered, they still love each other.

According to Gefter, it was  “an entertaining alchemy of talent, vision, tension, drama, ego, rigor and drama that brought Virginia Woolf to the big screen.” He goes on: “No matter how tempered, decorous, or respectful the daily comportment of any couple, their underlying feelings of attachment dwell in a private, unpredictable universe subject to its own solar flares of displeasure, shooting meteors of pain, and exploding stars of rage.” The film “remains today an existential provocation that serves up a range of fundamental truths about marital attachments … necessarily lurking, safely hidden, beneath the rituals of everyday life.”

Gefter also notes that Sidney Lumet’s film version of Long Day’s Journey into Night opened the same week as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway. Virginia Woolf, the play was written by Edward Albee. The author had been educated by living in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s:

Being there completed my education. I saw all the Abstract Expressionist painters; I heard contemporary music; I got to see off-off Broadway plays—Beckett, Brecht, Pirandello. The paperback book market was around, so I read a lot.”

Pope Leo’s movie lecture resonated so deeply because, unlike most of today’s American filmmakers, the pope reads a lot.