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‘Cabrini’ Review: Lifeless Religious Drama Chronicles Hardships Faced by Determined Italian Nun Who Fought for Immigrants
'Cabrini,' directed by 'Sound of Freedom' filmmaker Alejandro Monteverde, tells the story of an Italian nun in N.Y. who fought for immigrants.
A filmmaker with an unabashedly Christian conservative agenda, Monteverde’s latest is a frustratingly sluggish biopic of Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini(Cristiana Dell’Anna), an Italian nun who defied the Catholic Church, as well as American institutions, to aide her countrymen in New York City during the late 1800s. After a meeting with Pope Leo XIII (Giancarlo Giannini) to discuss her plans to build orphanages in China, the Holy Father, an admirer of her conviction, tasks her with crossing the Atlantic to bring help and hope to mostly illiterate Italian migrants, particularly children living in dehumanizing conditions, faced with rampant xenophobia and a lack of health services. But will their target audience — those watching through a white supremacist, “anti-woke” and surely anti-immigrant lens — be willing to extend the same empathy the movie might make them feel for Italian children, of the same race and faith, to the kids arriving at the southern border escaping poverty and violence or to those dying in Gaza?
Or read this on Variety