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      ‘Rebel Hearts’ Review: Sisters Act Up

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      This flashy, feel-good documentary follows a group of progressive Catholic nuns in 1960s Los Angeles.Few institutions notoriously resist change like the Roman Catholic Church, which to this day upholds rules of celibacy and continues to forbid the ordination of women. So for some, it may be surprising to learn that the church’s iron-fisted rule has long been met with resistance.Such a struggle is captured in “Rebel Hearts,” Pedro Kos’s feel-good documentary about a particularly gutsy group of nuns who took inspiration from the social upheavals of the 1960s to fight against exploitation by their male superiors.Combining archival footage with paper doll-esque animation and a flurry of talking-head interviews gathered over two decades by Shawnee Isaac-Smith, one of the film’s producers, this documentary traces the controversies and trailblazing feats of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, whose social activism and participation in civil rights and workers protests upended notions of the fragile, cloistered nun.Led by Anita Caspary, these women — and the liberal college they ran in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles — were considered dangerous by Catholic hard-liners like Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, the entrepreneurial head of the Los Angeles Archdiocese who the documentary claims staffed his many religious schools with unpaid, unqualified young nuns. Caspary and her unruly flock (including the pop artist Corita Kent, whose screen prints and drawings were often the cause of scandal) collectively sought autonomy — voting, for instance, to rescind the habit requirement.An unrelenting pop music soundtrack vests the story with a cheesy rah-rah sensibility, while the film’s breakneck pacing hinders proper reflection of any single event or anecdote. The onslaught of information certainly impresses by illuminating a rich and not-often-discussed slice of feminist history, but the execution is distractingly flashy and gratingly unfocused.Rebel HeartsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Francesco’ Review: The Pope, Up Close, but Not That Close

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      The new documentary on Pope Francis is a missed opportunity to demystify elements of the papacy.Discovery+ is billing “Francesco,” a portrait of Pope Francis, as “an unprecedented look at the man behind the cloth.” But while the filmmakers were able to talk to Pope Francis in person, a large portion of the documentary comes from a layer out. The director, Evgeny Afineevsky, includes ample footage of the pope’s public appearances, images of his tweets and interviews with multiple people identified as “longtime friend of Pope Francis.”This approach, focusing on the message and not the messenger, seems consistent with Francis’s modesty, and the film plays like a channel for spreading his ideas on the environment, refugees and religious coexistence. All of that is to the good. But judged strictly as a movie, “Francesco” comes across as shapeless and secondhand — a missed opportunity to present a closer look at the daily work of being pope and perhaps to demystify elements of the papacy.We learn, for instance, that when Francis visited Myanmar in 2017, he did not refer by name to the Rohingya, the Muslim ethnic group persecuted within the country, adhering to the policy of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s government not to use the word (although he did allude to the group, and a Rohingya refugee who met him in Bangladesh says the pope later asked for forgiveness). How are such inherently political decisions made? “Francesco” does not explain.The film is not always glowing. Juan Carlos Cruz, a victim of abuse by a priest in Chile, discusses how hard it was to see the pope dismiss as “slander” accusations that a bishop had covered up the abuse. But the film uses this to illustrate how Francis grew. He met with Cruz and ultimately defrocked the priest.FrancescoNot rated. In English, Spanish, Italian, Armenian and French with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More