Although I'm a lapsed Catholic, certain images and principals of the faith still move me. For example, when first Martin Sheen and then Moira Kelly wash the feet of a crusty pauper in Michael Rhodes's Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story, I choked up, felt annoyed at being manipulated, and then forgave the filmmakers for evoking the much neglected virtue of Christian charity. Much of this bio-pic employs such unsubtle but pure-hearted methods. Kelly is plucky, wry, and long-suffering as Day, a feminist, liberal Catholic activist whose five decades of service earned her the reputation of an American saint and a one-person social-reform movement.

But it wasn't an easy journey to her vocation. She's seen hobnobbing at first with such cynical, hard-drinking friends as Eugene O'Neill, marching in left-wing rallies, engaging in love affairs, and having an abortion. A child and a chance encounter with a nun and Sheen's too-whimsical French savant turn her attention not just to feeding the needy but inquiring into why they're hungry. It's corny, but also subversive -- the pro-life slant aside, Entertaining Angels is a breath of genuine generosity in a greedy, welfare-slashing era. At the Copley Place.