Having heard that Philomena, starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, is an anti-Catholic chick flick, I was half-eager to see it. Here's how--no spoiler alert needed--the movie works. It sets before us the depravity of the nuns running an Irish convent and the different reactions of the main characters to revelations of venality in Godly places--Philomena, the victim, played by Dench, who forgives, and the journalist investigating her case, an unbeliever played by Coogan, who'd damn the dear religious to hell if he believed in it and could. I'm all with him, which I think makes me anti-Catholic, but the movie seems to be at least 55% for Philomena's approach.
Not guilty of anti-Catholicism but a pretty good movie nevertheless: briskly plotted, well acted, sufficiently deft to avoid some obvious sinkholes, often funny, and with an unexpected gay subplot that shows what is almost necessarily true--"ordinary" Catholics are not as benighted as the ones in uniform.
