At the tail end of the 1960s, in the wake of the Catholic Church’s Vatican II reforms to transform the church into a more progressive global entity, thousands of nuns left behind their habits and ...

Her film may have far too many weighty matters on its mind to leave much room for petty resentments, but one wonders if writer-director Maggie Betts isn’t the teeniest bit annoyed that a certain other ...

The Oscar winner gets characteristically candid about playing a role she'd long hoped to land, and the challenges of being a strong woman at any age. But the Reverend Mother’s ability to wield ...

NOVITIATE focuses on a young woman preparing to become a nun in the early 1960s, just as the Catholic church is poised on the brink of the sweeping changes of Vatican II. Maggie Betts wrote and ...

Don’t mess with Melissa Leo. As Novitiate‘s Reverend Mother Marie St. Claire, the boss lady who calls the shots at the fictional Tennessee convent where this religious drama is based, the actress ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Maggie Betts’s path to feature film director began in an airport bookstore. “I’m not religious, but I was getting on a plane a few ...

Maggie Betts' Sundance premiere is filled with superior performances, but Qualley is its revelation. What makes a young woman choose to be a nun? In Margaret Betts’ revelatory “Novitiate,” which ...

They’re not made very often, and audiences don’t always applaud (Audrey Hepburn in “The Nun’s Story” is the notable exception) but films dealing with what goes on behind convent or monastery walls ...

That was the Sundance Film Festival’s director, John Cooper, introducing the Friday afternoon screening of Gillian Robespierre’s new comedy, “Landline.” For those of us who chose to bury ourselves in ...