One of my all time favorites.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

The documentary "Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God", BY Alex Gibney is a film about the charges of paedophelia and clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church against on Catholic priest, and the inner workings and the bureaucracy inside the Church that lead others to question its actions and the relation of these charges which lead up all the way to the Vatican itself. It follows of the story of four deaf men who were sexually abused by priests and other clerical members of the Catholic Church in the 1960's who set out to expose them. Throughout the movie, more and more complications in the inner workings and system of the Catholic Church are revealed.From a Catholic's perspective, I felt that this film did really well in its efforts to expose this issue of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. It shocks me that even Catholic priests are capable of committing heinous acts such as these. Throughout the movie, it continues to question the morals of the Catholic Church, its failure to act upon these charges even upon His Holiness Pope John Paul II, and how a crime like this actually went unpunished.I really enjoyed enjoyed this film because of the message and stand it took against combating sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. I really appreciated that Mr. Gibney was not at all afraid to portray these controversial topics such as paedophilia. I also like the scenes wherein he tried to portray the scenes that suggested the children were being sexually abused in the middle of the night, without showing any graphic sexual content. Another thing I liked was the underlying theme of the film: Silence in the House of God, which truly reflects on some of the priests who abuse their power. It made me wonder how these priests who preached everyday to people on how to live their lives were themselves committing such grave and heinous crimes. Overall I enjoyed the number of facts this movie has stated leading up to this issue. With this movie I rate it an 8.1 out of 10.

Alex Gibney's movie is an extremely well researched documentary about pedophilia in the Catholic Church. Sexual abuse by priests went on for a long time. But, nobody had the courage to speak openly about it. The power of the Church in Catholic countries was too overwhelming. If you criticized the clergy, you could lose your job. Alex Gibney's movie illustrates the silence on and of the Church with the unacceptable behavior of a priest in a School for the Deaf in Wisconsin, a formidable sexual abuse of power. For a long time, all complaints were swept off the table. But, when the facts were openly exposed in the media, a flood of new abuse cases followed, which would cost the Catholic Church billions of dollars. Alex Gibney's movie is an indictment of even the top of the Catholic Church. All complaints about pedophilia in the Church went to the desk of the former pope Benedict XVI, when he was dean of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. He did nearly nothing with them. This scandal shocked the whole Catholic Church. It lost the trust of its parishioners, leaving its churches nearly empty. Moreover, the number of vocations fell dramatically. In one word, the Catholic Church is dying. Alex Gibney's dramatic movie is a terrible document about one of the greatest religious scandals ever, which put even the pope, the representative of God on earth, in a very bad light. A must see.

The movie is done very well for a documentary. If it were me doing it, I would have been much more hateful and promote a sense of outrage towards those who could/can do something about it yet choose to remain silent. However, the producers were wise, and presented facts (spoken by the victims themselves), letting you make up your own mind about what they said. I found this to be very effective.The monumental size of the damage done by the silent church cannot be put in words. To know about tens of thousands of abuses on children, be able to take action, and yet choose to remain silent, it is beyond my comprehension not only as a human being, but as a devout Christian.I hope that people will not be mad at the one person that the movie focused on (Lawrence Murphy). Our instinct is to try and take our anger on him, and make him pay for what he did. But we cannot do that - he is dead, and even if he were alive, there is nothing we can do to completely take out our rage against the incomprehensible acts that he did. However, what we can do is watch the movie, vote on it, ask others to watch it, and find ways to support those who are far better equipped than us to take action.

After looking at the world of NHL pugilists in last year's outstanding The Last Gladiators, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God finds director Alex Gibney returning to investigating abuses of power, a theme that has served him well in past efforts like Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room and the Oscar-winning Taxi To The Dark Side. This disturbing exposé on the problem of child and youth sexual abuse in the Catholic Church focuses partly on the stories of five deaf men who are thought to be the first individuals to ever publicly protest abuses by clergy in the United States, after they were victimized by Father Lawrence Murphy at St. John's School for the Deaf in the suburbs of Milwaukee during the 60s and 70s. Gibney also takes a broader view of the subject by looking at other cases of clergy abuse (notably in Ireland) and the systematic cover-ups of these crimes by the Catholic Church's top officials, whose unofficial policy on the matter is to "deny, minimize, and blame", according to one journalist interviewed. "Mea Maxima Culpa's" Latin translation is "my most grievous fault".Although the five St. John's victims have been working for over three decades to call attention to the issue and seek justice for their suffering, their story gained traction after New York Times writer Laurie Goodstein wrote an article in 2010 about the Vatican's failure to defrock Murphy, despite the fact that they were presented with undeniable evidence of his crimes and received strong warnings from some American church officials. Murphy is believed to have molested over 200 boys at the boarding school from the 50s until 1974, when he was transferred to another parish. The Vatican was alerted of Murphy's behaviour in 1963 and did nothing. Actors Jamey Sheridan, Chris Cooper, Ethan Hawke, and John Slattery give voice to the victims, who use sign language with punctuated hand slaps to express the horrors they endured at the hand of Murphy and the shame that followed. Murphy's textbook predatory behaviour found him singling out what he perceived as the weaker students and further exploiting the fact that they faced an obvious barrier in communicating over the phone with their families. Three of the victims, including Terry Kohut, who sued the Catholic Church and named the current Pope in his lawsuit, were on hand for the world premiere TIFF screening I attended and gave their emotional reaction to it afterwards at the Q & A through a sign language interpreter. Just knowing that they were in the audience and reliving their pain while seeing the finished film for the first time added an extra significance and weight to the proceedings.The investigations resulting from the Kohut lawsuit ended up leading to the discovery of secret Vatican documents that detailed many instances of sexual abuse cover-ups that reach to the highest levels of the Catholic Church, with Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) substantially implicated. In the years before being anointed Pope, Ratzinger oversaw a Vatican council that monitored sexual abuse cases in the Church, so his post-anointment claims of being unaware of most of what was occurring seem highly unlikely. How his and his predecessor's culpability and mishandling of these tragic cases hasn't been a much larger media story is difficult to understand.That aside, overall media coverage of child and youth sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has, sadly, become an all-too-familiar story that one almost becomes numb to. Gibney rises to the challenge of presenting a fresh take on a much-discussed important subject with this well-researched and powerful film. My only real negative about it are the re-enactments that Gibney employs, even if they are artfully composed and beautifully shot, using plenty of religious imagery. Re-enactments are a staple of Gibney's work (not to mention Errol Morris'), but the stories he tells are usually compelling enough and, in my opinion, the end results are slightly diminished with this gimmicky device that feels like an imagination crutch for the audience.