Pope Leo XIV’s four favorite films
Pope Leo XIV didn’t hesitate when asked to name his four favorite films. The question was put to him in anticipation of his upcoming meeting with actors and filmmakers on November 15, organized by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education in collaboration with the Dicastery for Communication and the Vatican Museums. Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, had answered the same question a few years ago: Francis’s favorites were Fellini’s La Strada, Axel’s Babette’s Feast, Kurosawa’s Rhapsody in August, and Rossellini’s Rome, Open City.
Leo announced his own favorites in a brief video, weaving an invisible thread through It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), The Sound of Music (1965), Ordinary People (1980), and Life Is Beautiful (1997). It’s a thread that runs through half a century of Western cinema—connecting Frank Capra’s Christmas fable, Robert Wise’s immaculate musical, Robert Redford’s intimate drama, and Roberto Benigni’s tragic fairytale.
When George Bailey (James Stewart) leans over the bridge, ready to throw himself into the river, It’s a Wonderful Life teeters on the edge of the American dream’s darkest night. Capra—the Italian American director who once filmed the civic optimism of the New Deal—here confronts the moral exhaustion of a man crushed by a world ruled by money. Though released in 1946, the film anticipates the anxiety of postwar America, where prosperity threatened to suffocate solidarity. The angel Clarence saves George by showing him what the world would be like without him. It’s an act of imagination: humanity revealed through the possibility of its own erasure. Capra made quietly theological cinema. The angel isn’t sentimental decoration but a revelation of the invisible fabric that binds human beings together. It’s a Wonderful Life is, in essence, a film about the ethical power of empathy. Its message—“No man is a failure who has friends”—remains one of the most radical lines ever spoken in an American movie, and one that Leo holds dear.
Released two decades later, The Sound of Music may seem at first glance like pure escapism. Yet beneath its sweet surface, Robert Wise stages a form of civil and spiritual resistance. Maria (Julie Andrews) is no mere singing governess; she’s a woman who chooses joy as an act of defiance. Set in Austria as it bends under the weight of the Anschluss, the film opposes song to marching orders, melody to martial discipline. Its musical numbers are not ornament—they are acts of collective freedom, gestures of an emotional education that restores humanity to those who’ve lost it. In the final scene, the Von Trapp family climbs the mountains, escaping Nazism—an image that echoes, in reverse, George Bailey’s descent from despair back to life. Like Capra, Wise believes in the moral strength of kindness, but he translates it into song. His art is one of grace: goodness not as duty but as harmony disarming violence. Amid Cold War tensions and the rise of consumer culture, The Sound of Music offers a wistful nostalgia for a world where singing together could still change something.
With Ordinary People (1980), Robert Redford overturns that faith: goodness is no longer enough. This is post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America—an era of cultural hangover, psychotherapy, and domestic alienation. The Jarretts, a well-to-do suburban family, are shattered by the death of their eldest son and their unbearable survivor’s guilt. Redford directs the film with an almost Bergmanian austerity. Ordinary People, based on Judith Guest’s 1976 novel of the same title, is about the fragility of love in a world that has forgotten how to forgive. If Wise celebrates the liberatory power of song, Redford focuses on silence—on the pauses between people. The mother (Mary Tyler Moore) cannot weep; the father (Donald Sutherland) cannot understand; the son (Timothy Hutton) cannot live. The “ordinary people” of the title are the inverted image of Capra’s “wonderful life”: the American dream imploding on itself. Yet within that bleakness, Redford preserves a faint glimmer of redemption—not a miracle, but a word spoken at last. When the father finally embraces his son, the silence is broken.
Finally, there is Life Is Beautiful (1997): the return of goodness in a century of evil. Benigni dares to do the unthinkable—to tell the story of the Holocaust as a fable. He does not deny the suffering but salvages the human within it. Guido Orefice, a Jewish father deported with his son, invents a game to shield the child from horror. Irony becomes the last refuge of love. The film was accused by some critics of sentimentality. Yet its power lies in its paradox. Benigni merges the clown and the martyr, the innocent and the witness. Like Capra and Wise, he believes in goodness as subversion; but like Redford, he knows that goodness alone cannot always save. What saves is sometimes just the capacity to give meaning to pain—to turn it into a shared language. Life Is Beautiful is, at its core, a film about artistic creation as survival: imagination as the final act of humanity in a dehumanizing system.
These four films, so different in time and tone, form what might be called a tetralogy of grace. In each, goodness appears fragile, naïve, almost out of place—and yet precisely for that reason, revolutionary. George Bailey, Maria von Trapp, Conrad Jarrett, and Guido Orefice embody what Pope Francis once called “the middle class of holiness”: ordinary people who, against all evidence, still believe in the possibility of goodness. In these stories, cinema itself becomes a form of spiritual resistance. Capra does it through community, Wise through song, Redford through vulnerability, Benigni through imagination. All, however, speak of the same miracle: the decision to remain kind in an unkind world.
Leo XIV sees in these films a lesson that, in an age of systemic cynicism and defensive irony, feels almost subversive. Perhaps it’s time to watch them again—one after another—and rediscover with George Bailey, in his dark night of the soul, that life is indeed wonderful. Not because it is painless, but because, despite everything, some still choose to be human.
Antonio Spadaro, SJ, is undersecretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See. He is a member of the board of directors of Georgetown University and an Ordinary academic of the Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts and Letters of the Virtuosi al Pantheon. He was editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica for twelve years.
Reproduced with permission from Commonweal.
