A movie miracle: how Hollywood found religion
Big news from the box office: some people released some Christian-themed movies that weren’t completely terrible. The terribleness of Christian movies is, of course, an article of faith among film critics, who reserve for them their most damning barbs (“doesn’t even meet the standards of decent propaganda”; “doesn’t belong in a theatre”). On Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, they garner basement-level scores rivalled only by torture porn and holocaust-exploitation flicks. But not this year, which has seen box-office success for studio-backed movies such as Son of God ($67m since its debut in late February), Darren Aronofsky’s Noah ($359m), God’s Not Dead ($60m), Heaven is for Real ($91m), and, soon Ridley Scott’s retelling of the story of Moses, Exodus.
