This is sold as the "nuns who protest" movie. All the pictures I saw for it were nuns in the middle of marches in the 60s and 70s. That's much more attention-grabbing than the rest of the movie is though. This documentary is about the Immaculate Heart nuns in Los Angeles. They were a comparatively radical group in the Catholic church during the counter-culture movement and rubbed against church leadership. The stuff about them attending protests and Sister Corita's national popularity and art is fun, but it's not a huge part of the movie. Most of it is actually about the Vatican II reforms of the early 70s and how Immaculate Heart pushed those for even more change. This gets very in the weeds of Catholicism and I suspect people raised Catholic and non-Catholics will watch this in different ways. I'm in the former group and am pretty familiar with the Vatican II reforms and the effect they had on the church.
The movie gets stale when it becomes about the infighting of church leadership. There's only so much that I can get invested in the battle between super conservative policies and very conservative policies. The movie definitely exaggerates the extent to which Vatican II reforms were rolled back. The church just doesn't like to move quickly.
So yeah, this could've been cut down to a documentary short without any problem. The movie never overcomes the fact that the most striking thing is seeing pictures of nuns in places you wouldn't expect, and the story behind the pictures isn't as interesting. At the end of the day, no matter how progressive you paint them, they're still nuns.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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