Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

If you’ve ever thought that the story of how the blessed virgin Mary met and wed the Nazarene carpenter Joseph before the two of them traveled to Bethlehem in time for her to give birth to the Son of God would be a really great subject for a teen romcom… wow. I am concerned about […]

A review by M.C. Steffen Part of giving any movie a fair shake is making an effort to grasp the codes it uses to communicate to its intended audience. In a musical, when characters sing, you’re meant to understand that they’re expressing emotions too overwhelming for mere speech; whether that convention is to your taste […]

A Week Away, which is basically being advertised as Netflix’s Camp Rock for Gen Z, holds off for about three minutes before the big reveal: It’s a Christian movie. And not just any old Christian movie. It’s a CCM (contemporary Christian music) jukebox musical featuring updated versions of hits from the likes of Amy Grant, […]

I could tell you what I thought Assassin 33 A.D. was going to be about, and I would not turn out to have been precisely “wrong”, and it would seem like a completely bugfuck bonkers movie that simultaneously must be seen to be believed, and also is so revolting to human decency that nobody really […]

Because I am fundamentally broken, wretched person, I come to the films in the God’s Not Dead franchise with a certain expectation of laughing at the ineptitude, cringing in merry pleasure at the deep lack of understanding of human behavior, and feeling a twisted, ripped-up churning in my guts, like I’ve got a live copperhead […]

2014’s God’s Not Dead has a loopy, auto-erotic concept that makes no sense, but I can vaguely see how, if you were so deep in the culture war trenches that you needed binoculars to see daylight, it might seem like its story of hostile academics trying to humiliate the Christ out of their students speaks […]

God’s Not Dead has become the stand-in in popular consciousness for a whole genre: the hectoring message movie designed exclusively for U.S. conservative evangelical audiences. And this makes a great deal of sense: it was a huge, shocking box-office success, making $61 million in North America from a $2 million dollar budget, which makes it […]

“These films have a peculiar and at times indefinable whiff of the ersatz”, I once said about films made for conservative, fundamentalist Christian audiences on mainstream models, and while I was right, I got lucky. You don’t know from ersatz until you’ve seen The Star, which is on the one hand a studio-funded “faith audience” […]

A review requested by M.C., with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There once was a time when political commentator Ben Stein was… not cool. He was always a bit of a droning blowhard. But he was the droning blowhard you rooted for. He was that square, smug relative […]

Brothers Alex & Stephen Kendrick, of Georgia, are white fundamentalist Evangelical Christians who have made many a film about other white fundamentalist Evangelical Christians. One of them starred no less a superstar in that community than Kirk Cameron, which tells you what kind of fundamentalist Evangelicalism they’re attached to, and I will not suggest what […]

The moment when you start to voice the old “I can’t believe they left that part of of the book out of the movie! That was the best part!” complaint, and the movie about which you are complaining is Left Behind, that’s when you discover that you need to take a nice long break from […]

I have wonderful news: Left Behind: World at War isn’t nearly such an angrifying slog as its predecessor, Tribulation Force, and we’ll have none of the bitterness that got in between me and my snark when I wrote about it. Compared to that film, and compared also to 2000’s original Left Behind, the 2005 trilogy-capper […]