The Ninth Gate
(Directed by Roman Polanski, opened in theaters March 10, 2000)

I will start off by saying that this was not a movie about Witches at all, though it did mention Witches a couple of times, but unfortunately that won't stop people from making the wrong connections and assuming it is about Witchcraft anyway.
     The film is about a "book detective", a man who finds and sells very rare or old books (Played brilliantly by Johnny Depp).  He is hired by an eccentric millionaire to take a copy of a rare book, supposedly written by Lucifer himself, and authenticate it against the only two other copies of the book in existence.  This book supposedly contained a riddle that, when solved, would summon the devil himself, giving the person who  solved it incredible power, riches, girls, free cable, etc.
     One of the first things that people will notice is that the book, the one written by Satan, has an inverted pentagram on the cover.  This is actually the correct symbol for the topic, a red inverted pentagram with no circle enclosing it is a traditional Satanist symbol and is nothing like the upright pentacle enclosed within a circle that modern Witches and Wiccans use, but unfortunately many people who don't know any better will, undoubtedly, confuse the two symbols.  I will give credit to the creators of the movie, though, because they did use the correct symbol throughout the film and never confused it with the symbol of Wicca, I'll leave the confusion for the average movie-going public.
      A big problem I did have with the movie was that there were several references to Witches and Covens.  All of these references were to the 16th and 17th century definition of Witches and Covens, and were never meant to indicate modern Witchcraft at all, but again, the average movie-going public won't understand the difference between the two and once again assume that modern Witches are in league with Satan.  Again, the use of the words witch and coven were used correctly in the context of the movie, but they had at least one opportunity to add a "disclaimer" about modern Witches, and they ignored it.  In the scene, the eccentric millionaire is actually teaching a class on the occult.  Several mentions are made of Witches, in the diabolical sense, during his lecture, and he actually concludes the class by giving a book reference list for anyone interested in more information about demonology or witchcraft.  I thought it was a perfect opportunity to add something like "of course, modern Witches are nothing like this and are really nice people" etc., but you can't always get what you want.
    One of the better points I would like to address is that, even though Witches are spoken about, none of the major players in the movie, through all their devil summoning and murder, ever calls themselves a witch, and none ever even insinuate that modern devil worshippers consider themselves witches.  I feel that this seemingly small detail goes a long way to show that these people weren't Witches, and that Witches don't spend their days searching for ancient texts to summon lucifer.  If this one point had been ignored and the word "witch" was thrown around freely, I think this movie would have quickly become a masterpiece in witch-bashing.
     Witchcraft misconceptions aside, this was a good movie.  I felt that the creators actually covered the subject matter well without purposely defaming true Witchcraft, and that most of the misconceptions people will glean from the film are the fault of the viewer, not the movie itself.  True, a bit more could have been done to better define the line between 16th century diabolical "witchcraft" and the modern Craft, but how far can we really expect them to go?  In a movie based on 16th century demonology and devil worship, I personally feel they went far enough