From a review at The American Spectator:
The excellent 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited was re-run on my local TV recently. … From the religious point of view, the themes it dealt with included one that few writers in modern times have tackled — the fact that Salvation is offered to all and by Divine Grace the rich may be saved as well as the poor.
I didn’t know there was such a thing as an American or British TV series I could ever stand to watch, but this sounds interesting. How do I break the news to my wife, though, that I’d like to watch some television someday?
The description in that review reminds me somewhat of one of the Russian movies we watched several months ago: Unfinished Piece for Player Piano, based on a Chekov work. At first I considered sending it back to Netflix and trying something else. Why did I want to see a movie about superficial, degenerate aristocrats? But in the end I gave this one a 5. It wasn’t really a religious film, but it was surprising to us to see a respectful, non-superficial treatment of religion in a Soviet-era film. Granted, it wasn’t a pre-WWII Stalin film, but still, where would you have seen something like that in a U.S. made film?
Which reminds me, I wonder what director Nikita Mikhalkov is up to lately. The knock on him is that he is a political chameleon, taking on the coloration of whatever regime is in power. So what is he doing for Putin now? Or is he getting too old for movie-making anymore?