Cinema: Crying Shame At Lincoln Center

The U.S. premiere of Hail Mary stirs Catholic protests

The morally outraged, intent on what they conceive to be the Lord's work, usually end by doing an ace press agent's job publicizing the object of their disapproval. In 1950 Roberto Rossellini's The Miracle, about a simple village woman impregnated by a shepherd she thinks is divine, benefited from this ironic corollary to the law of unintended consequences. Now comes Hail Mary, Jean-Luc Godard's modern and, to say the least, highly vernacular version of the story of the Annunciation and the Virgin Birth. Having been denounced, sight unseen, by no less a critic than Pope John Paul II ("deeply wounds the...

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