Critic: DaVinci Not All That Controversial, After All

As worldwide protests by devout Catholics continue unabated, The DaVinci Code got its first screening at Cannes last night, and Simon Houpt says that all the hand-wringing isn’t necessary. Opus Dei, the secretive Catholic sect depicted as murderous in Dan Brown’s novel, “is granted some slack in the big-screen version, which opens across the world on Friday. Furthermore, theories about the life of Jesus Christ that have caused consternation in the Catholic world, brought condemnation from the Vatican, and provoked calls for boycotts across the globe, are presented with a measure of skepticism on film that the book does not possess.”