145 min | PG-13 | March 8, 2024 | Angel Studios
Angel Studios tells the story of Mother Cabrini, the Italian nun who built hospitals and orphanages in 1890s New York through sheer force of will. Cristiana Dell’Anna is a revelation.
Francesca Cabrini arrives in New York City in 1889. She is an Italian nun with a chronic lung condition and broken English and a mission to help the thousands of Italian immigrant children living in squalor. The city does not want her. The Archbishop tells her to go home. The mayor is openly hostile. She ignores all of them. The film is a portrait of institutional obstruction and the specific kind of stubbornness required to overcome it. Cabrini did not ask permission. She acted and dared the powerful to stop her.
Cristiana Dell’Anna plays Cabrini with fierce intelligence and physical fragility. She is a woman whose body is failing while her will remains unbreakable. Dell’Anna is not well-known to American audiences and that anonymity helps. You see the character, not the star. John Lithgow plays the mayor with the condescending authority of a man who has never been told no by a nun. David Morse plays Archbishop Corrigan with institutional caution that reads as cowardice. Giancarlo Giannini brings papal gravitas to his scenes as Pope Leo XIII.
Alejandro Monteverde directs with more visual sophistication than the faith-based genre typically delivers. The Five Points setting is rendered with grime and texture. The cinematography captures 1890s New York with enough period detail to feel immersive without feeling like a museum. The script structures Cabrini’s accomplishments as a series of escalating confrontations with power. Each victory costs her something physically. The stakes are real.
Angel Studios distributed Sound of Freedom and found an audience hungry for films about moral courage. Cabrini is a better film than that one. It earns its inspirational moments through specificity rather than manipulation. The real Cabrini built sixty-seven institutions across three continents. The film covers a fraction of that work and makes it feel monumental. Faith-based filmmaking does not have to mean bad filmmaking. This proves it.