After the conclusion of the shooting of the polemic movie "This Is My Blood" about the life of Jesus performing the role of Maria Magdalene, the successful actress Marie Palesi (Juliette Binoche) feels obsessed by the life of her character and decides to stay in Jerusalem in a quest of faith and self-knowledge to fulfill the emptiness of her life. The selfish and egocentric director Tony Childress (Matthew Modine) returns to New York, where he meets the atheist host of a famous TV show Ted Younger (Forest Whitaker) in the prescreening of his movie. Ted is presenting a series of programs about the life of Jesus Christ and invites Tony to participate as a guest in his show. Meanwhile, Ted has one night stand with Tony's assistant and his upset wife Elizabeth Younger (Heather Graham) has problems with her pregnancy having an early delivery. When the desperate Ted sees the pain of his wife and his premature newborn son, he regrets and feels the need to pray for his beloved family.Abel Ferrara usually uses Catholic icons in his movies; however, "Mary" is specifically about elements of the Catholicism, such as faith, guilty, sin, love and regret. The story is very well acted by Forest Whitaker, Juliette Binoche and Matthew Modine; however, the screenplay is confused and something is missing to make "Mary" a great movie. Nevertheless, it is an original story and does not disappoint. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "Maria" ("Mary")

My wife and I were trying really hard hard hard to see this piece of art to the very end, hoping that its endless boredom will end up, as it says "thriller" on its genre. No plot we did find, no interesting part, no good feeling of watching a movie but anger how wonderful stuff HBO showed up on Saturday prime time in the Czech Republic. Who pays for this "art"? The authors only stole some ideas from Da Vinci Code without making their final product interesting. Just non stop rehashing "Jesus this and Jesus that, and Mary Magdalene this and Mary Magdalene that", just good for priest seminary.I understand that not every day is a holiday, isn't it? But why on Saturday evening prime time, HBO, why!?

During the 80's and 90's,director Abel Ferrara was one of the leaders of the independent cinema making amazing films which challenged the spectator.But,his recent works are far away from his previous works.New Rose Hotel and R Xmas were a little bit disappointing but they were interesting experiments.But,I do not know what was Ferrara thinking when he was making Mary,a tedious and boring movie and,by my point of view,a huge let down in his career.During 83 minutes,the movie shows us three stories which are totally boring and uninteresting.I think Ferrara wanted to make an analysis about the religion but,still with that,I think he had to do a better work to make a coherent connection between the stories.For me,it is very disappointing that Ferrara,who made excellent films with very little resources(like,for example,Bad Lieutenant,The Addiction,Ms.45 and The Body Snatchers),was behind this crap.I hope Mary is only an unexplainable false move in Ferrara's career and that,he will get redeemed soon.But I cannot recommend Mary,which is a tedious film.

It seems like Juliette Binoche is trying to compete with Orson Welles, who received joint third billing in The Third Man in return for about 8 minutes screen time. Here Binoche draws top billing and gets to work about ten or twelve minutes. It's very possible that without her prominent billing this wouldn't draw flies. Sure, the usual suspects, the Festival crowd who like to award prizes to worthless material - check L'Esquive if you don't believe me - have appeared out of the woodwork at Venice but I was part of an audience of eight and most of those I suspect were sheltering from the snow that fell on Paris earlier today. Perhaps it's me but I couldn't detect much of a reason for actually making this. After the hackneyed opening - the rolling of the rock only to discover the body of Jesus is no longer there and a director yelling 'cut' to let us know it's only a film - director/actor Matthew Modine tells Binoche it's time to go back to NY, just like that maybe two minutes after completing the scene, no wrap party, no packing, nothing! only for her to announce she's splitting and leaving for Jerusalem like now, Man. Okay, she's been profoundly affected by perhaps months of filming and immersing herself in the role of Mary Magdalene but we have to take that on trust. After that we get dragged into the story of Forest Whittaker, a celebrity TV interviewer who just happens to be making a series of programmes on Religion and hardly ever gets back to his pregnant wife who, in the real world, instead of yelling at him would be down at the studio because as a celebrity he surely has enough clout to have his wife there. There's lots of talk and I mean TALK, endless, meaningless and in between Binoche wanders around Jerusalem looking cute as Amalie but ultimately this is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying ... nothing.