christian movie review soul

Copyright, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Reviewed by: Raphael Vera CONTRIBUTOR

What is the human soul?

Movies that seem attempt to legitimize ALL “spiritual” sources as having accurate answers for those with questions

How do human fantasies about the human soul presented in this film diverge markedly from reality?

Personality traits we are born with compared to those we develop through education, life experiences and self-discipline

Value of mentoring

FEAR, Anxiety and Worry —What does the Bible say? Answer

What brings true happiness to our lives?

Learning to stop focusing only on ourselves and our own desires and help others

What is LOVE , for a follower of Christ? Answer

What is DEATH? and WHY does it exist? Answer in the Bible

Destination of our souls after we leave Earthly life

What is the FINAL JUDGMENT? and WHAT do you need to know about it? Answer

What is ETERNAL LIFE? Answer

What is ETERNAL DEATH? Answer

Liars and deceivers

Human meanness and outbursts of severe anger

About the fall of mankind to worldwide depravity

What is SIN AND WICKEDNESS? Is it just “bad people” that are sinners, or are YOU a sinner? Answer

Are you good enough to get to Heaven? Answer

How good is good enough? Answer

Will all mankind eventually be saved? Answer

How can we know there’s a God? Answer

About GOD (in our WebBible Encyclopedia)

Being passionate about life

“Everybody has a soul. Joe Gardiner is about to find his.”

J oe Gardner ( Jamie Foxx ) is a band teacher who has dreamed of playing professionally as a Jazz musician. On the greatest day of his life, he auditions for a Jazz legend before dying in a freak accident. The next thing he knows, he finds himself on a mystical stairway in space leading to “The Great Beyond.”

Joe refuses to accept his fate and, determined to return to his previous life, ends up instead in “The Great Before.” Here ‘new souls’ work on developing their “spark,” the thing that will bring them joy in life. Once they get their “spark” they are sent to begin their life on Earth. Mistaken for a mentor, he is assigned the most difficult of new souls simply named, “22.” 22 ( Tina Fey ) can’t fathom why Joe wants to get back to his boring life but is intrigued enough to learn more about what is so great on Earth.

An animated, metaphysical romp through the fantasy “before-life,” “Soul” is at times, charming, playful, funny but also a clever way to look at the passions that drive us towards our own fulfillment and purpose in life. By no means an overtly offensive nor a theologically accurate view of ‘the soul,’ the film includes some points of concern.

Content of Concern

Hindu/New Age Religion: The character 22 introduces Joe to a friend, Moonwind ( Graham Norton ), a hippie whose beliefs harken to Eastern philosophies and rituals and speaks of one’s ‘chakra.’ A soul on the way to “The Great Beyond” speaks of her different expectations of the after-life, however keep in mind that neither God’s final judgment , nor eternal life in Heaven are ever shown or addressed. Rather, the film messages a different impression with a worldview more consistent with Hindu/New Age suppositions, in contradiction to God’s Word.

Lastly, the angelic-seeming caretakers of ‘new souls’ are depicted as ever-changing, two-dimensional living lines-of-force, who describe themselves as “the coming together of all quantized fields of the universe.” What a shame not to acknowledge God’s angels who are very real, very powerful first creations of God .

What does the Bible teach about angels? Answer

More about ANGELS in the Bible

Violence: Mild. Slapstick represents the majority of the violence, which is seldom directed towards another person, and when 22 slaps Joe several times it is only to show him that nothing can hurt souls in that realm. Likewise, a giant construct falls on a group of ‘new souls’ but they simply walk through it while laughing. Joe is seen before the opening credits as falling through a manhole to his off-screen death.

Scariness: The most frightening aspects of “The Great Before” takes place primarily in the realm called, The Zone. Here, souls that are obsessed with something on Earth are disconnected from ‘life’ and become grotesque, monstrous versions of themselves. Parents of younger children should be warned that this imagery may scare them.

Language: Minor. God’s name is not taken in vain, except for a single use of “Oh my Lord .” The word “ h*ll ” is used numerous times (12+), albeit playfully and innocently by “new-souls.” This happens after Joe asks, “Is this H-E double hockey sticks?” The word “h*llish” is used once. “Cr*p” is also uttered.

Sex/Nudity: None.

Food for Thought

GOD’S SOVEREIGNTY— Joe states, “I’m not dying the very day I get my shot.” Similar to the parable of the rich fool who thought he had more time, Joe doesn’t consider the fact that God alone determines our time on Earth. He alone is in control.

“But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God .” —Luke 12:21

“…whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.” —James 4:13-14

“The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.” —Proverbs 16:9

What is the SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD? Answer

What is GOD’S PROVIDENCE ? Answer

What is “THE FEAR OF THE LORD”? and Why is it important? Answer

What is HUMILITY? and WHY is it important to be humble? Answer

What is the “ FURY ” of God? Answer

About God’s love and an answer to the questions : What is the true nature of God’s love? Is it biblically accurate to say, “God hates the SIN, but loves the SINNER”?

THE SOUL— The film depicts various personality traits as they are being assigned to new souls to ‘round them out’ before they can move on to Earth. Although this is not accurate Biblically, the Holy Scripture contains many references to our Lord ‘knowing us’ before we were born testifying both to His omniscience and position as Creator of all aspects of reality who knew the end from the beginning.

“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made… Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” —Psalm 139:13-16

CONTENTMENT— Joe is stunned to learn that his barber had always wanted to be a Veterinarian. Joe laments that he must be unhappy, but his barber counters that he is as happy as a clam. The Apostle Paul’s letter to the Philippians speaks clearly on this.

“Not that I speak from want, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am.” —Philippians 4:13

Furthermore, we see that after Joe attains his dream job he has a moment of clarity and doesn’t feel as fulfilled as he had expected. We remember the joy he had mentoring the kids in his band class and can’t help but wonder along with him if that was the better path for him.

“Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” —Philippians 2:4

Our Lord Jesus himself addressed our desires, but in context of our Heavenly Father and in the proper order.

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God , and his righteousness : and all these things shall be added unto you.” —Matthew 6:33

The Kingdom of God — What, when and where is it? Answer

On the other hand, 22, who has never known joy, gets a taste of it on Earth when she takes in its beauty (God’s creations). Later, Joe experiences a bit of that wonder as seen through 22’s eyes.

“The heavens declare the glory of God ; the skies proclaim the work of His hands.” —Psalm 19:1

PURPOSE— Joe’s “spark” is his love of music , but he takes it to the next level when he declares, “My only purpose on this planet is to play.” As the film’s angelic stand-ins tell him, his spark is not his purpose. Mentoring, whether it be to his students or 22 seems to be at the core of both his contentment and his purpose. Our Heavenly Father wants nothing less for us, but we are to be looking at Him if we want to find our purpose.

“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD , plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope .” —Jeremiah 29:11

“Who saved us and called us to a holy calling , not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace , which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.” —2 Timothy 1:9

“Soul” splits its time between two worlds, the metaphysical and the real, and in the process produces the kind of thrilling visuals we have come to expect from Pixar. Story-wise, this may be the studios’ most adult film yet. The drawback being that the emotional crossroads Joe is going through will not resonate with a younger audience. The film is unlikely to hold the interest of many youngsters.

The middle act, where 22 is in Joe’s body and Joe is in his therapy cat is the most engaging and features the film’s most hilarious scenes, but that tone is quickly lost when that chapter comes to an abrupt close.

“Soul” has some decent messages, but it is combined with a confused Hindu/New Age worldview. Sadly, it misses the opportunity to make the final leap to address our true purpose or God and His wonderful ultimate plan for mankind. Ultimately, “Soul” comes across as a somewhat fascinating but often middling effort that falls short of Pixar at its best.

Violence: Mild
Profane language: Minor
Occult: Minor
Vulgar/Crude language: None
Nudity: None
Drugs/Alcohol: None

See list of Relevant Issues—questions-and-answers .

Young people
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DVD & Streaming
Animation , Comedy , Drama , Kids , Music , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

An animated Black music teacher stands before his class in Soul.

In Theaters

January 12, 2024
Jamie Foxx as Joe Gardner; Tina Fey as 22; Questlove as Curly; Phylicia Rashad as Libba Gardner; Daveed Diggs as Paul; Angela Bassett as Dorothea Williams; Graham Norton as Moonwind; Rachel House as Terry; Richard Ayoade, Alice Braga, Wes Studi, Fortune Feimster and Zenobia Shroff as Jerry

Home Release Date

December 25, 2020
Pete Docter

Distributor

Movie review.

Life begins … when?

You look at your newsfeed any day of the week, and you know what an explosive question that is, even superficially. But dig deeper, and the answer grows even more complex. To live is not the same as to have a life . Did our life begin with conception? Our first conscious thoughts? Our first memories? Did it begin in kindergarten? In middle school? When we fell in love? Had children? Found our purpose?

Joe Gardner is a grown man with a job, a New York City apartment and a mustache. He’s alive. But he’s still waiting for life to begin.

And then, one day, it does.

The day was no different than most, at first. Joe, a talented jazz pianist working as a middle school music teacher, is teaching a bevy of students how to carry a tune—or, at least, to find the tune’s zip code. But then Curly, an old student of his, calls and asks if he’d like to sit in on a session with Dorthea Williams, the legendary jazz musician.

Would he?! Joe races to the club where Dorthea is to play. She’s skeptical at first: “So,” she says. “We’re down to middle school band teachers now.” But when his fingers touch the ivory, her doubts drain away. She tells him the show starts at nine. Be there at seven.

Joe feels as though his life is finally beginning. He floats out of the club, as happy as he’s ever been.

And he promptly falls through an open manhole.

Next thing he knows, Joe’s riding an escalator to the Great Beyond, a massive, white-bright something , where the souls of the newly departed go.

But Joe isn’t ready for the Great Beyond. “I’m not going to die the very day I got my shot!” he protests. As the escalator slowly moves upward, Joe bounds down, down, down until finally—

Pop! He finds himself in a strange place filled with adorable new souls and caretakers named Jerry. It’s not the Great Beyond , but the Great Before , where souls are prepared for their lives on earth. (Actually, it’s now called a “youth seminar,” Jerry explains. “Rebranding.”)

There Joe finds soul No. 22, who wants to be born just about as much as Joe wants to be dead. That is, not at all.

When does life begin? Seems like neither Joe nor 22 have a clue. But here, at the end/beginning of all things, perhaps they’ll find out.

Positive Elements

Joe’s given an opportunity to look back on his life, and he’s appalled with how little he did with his. “My life was meaningless,” he says.

But that’s not quite true.

The movie delicately suggests that he made a huge difference on some of the people he came in contact with: Curly says he never would’ve gone into music had it not been for Joe’s teaching. Another student, thinking about quitting, goes to Joe’s apartment in the hopes that he’ll talk her out of it. For Joe, teaching has always been something he’s had to do. But moviegoers see the impact he’s made on others. And even when he’s technically dead, he still makes a difference in 22’s pre-existent life, too.

That’s one of Soul’s overarching themes, in fact. In our celebrity-bedazzled world, we imagine that the only lives that matter are those that make a huge, splashy impact. Soul suggests there’s nothing wrong with wanting or having that sort of impact. But it also reminds us that those of us who live pretty normal lives can have an oversized impact on those around us, as well. And even when we fall into lives we never expected, there’s a joy and nobility in that, too.

For instance: We meet Dez, Joe’s barber, and learn that he never wanted to be a barber at all. He was hoping to be a veterinarian. But when his daughter got sick, he fell into the business. Joe feels sorry for him at first, but Dez rejects that pity out of hand. “I’m as happy as a clam, my man.” He sees his work as a way to change and improve lives. He says he makes his clients happy. “And make them handsome,” he adds.

Spiritual Elements

Let’s start with the movie’s name: Soul . That metaphysical concept is integral to what the movie’s about. We’ll need to spend some time here.

Joe spends much of the time in the movie as a soul, uncoupled from his own body. As such, Soul tells us that we’re more than just our physical constructs—more than just bone and blood and a little bit of brain matter.

There’s an inherent spirituality at work here, further emphasized by the Great Beyond, the Great Before and some metaphysical planes we see. The movie never takes us into the Great Beyond, so we don’t know what lies on the other side of that brilliant white light. But clearly plenty of souls (who aren’t Joe) are quite happy to be headed there.

The Great Before is more ticklish to deal with.

The idea that a soul exists before the body’s creation isn’t new: Lots of religions embrace that concept, and the Great Before feels a little like the Jewish concept of the Guf , or “treasury of souls,” which serves as a bit of a holding house for souls waiting to be born.

In contrast, most orthodox expressions of Christian theology have rejected the notion that the soul’s existence predates conception. Thus, the ideas about the afterlife and beforelife we see in Soul share little common ground with the most traditional forms of Christian teaching.

So what do we see in this story? All of the souls in this story are paired with a “tutor” before heading down to Earth, and soul No. 22 has been paired with plenty of teachers already—including the Catholic Mother Teresa, the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi and the religiously adventurous psychologist Carl Jung. And while you could interpret the caretakers of the Great Before as angels of a sort, they come across here more like incredibly compassionate daycare workers. (There’s also a soul accountant named Terry, through whom we learn that the afterlife’s tabulation system isn’t always spot on.)

Joe and 22 also come across some spiritual planes where only the souls of the living can go. One is “the Zone,” the place where people go when they’re particularly inspired or transfixed by what they’re doing; another is a vast wasteland where the obsessed roam endlessly and sadly. Some living visitors to these planes—practitioners of various Eastern and New Age meditative disciplines who call themselves “mystics without borders”—explain that one state can lead to another. The things that we love (and that send us to the Zone) can become obsessions themselves.

All of these metaphysical layers are meant to convey some important thoughts on what it means to live in our very tangible world, by the way—not serve as a roadmap for theological truth. Still, it’s good to be prepared for some potentially robust spiritual discussions as you unpack this story’s ideas and symbolism.

Elsewhere, we see that souls can switch bodies—comically possessing them, as it were—another idea that orthodox Christian teaching rejects, by the way. A cat is shown to have a soul, too.

Joe wonders whether he’s in heaven. When a Jerry tells him that he’s not, strictly speaking, he then asks if he’s in the other place. We hear references to chakras, chanting and meditation.

Sexual Content

Joe’s mind, we learn, is mainly filled with thoughts about jazz. But at least a corner of it is devoted to someone named Lisa. And when he and 22 find themselves back on earth in earthly bodies, 22 encourages him to rekindle what seems to be a long-dormant relationship. (Joe insists he doesn’t have the time.)

Joe rips the back of his trousers, revealing underwear.

Violent Content

Joe dies, of course—falling through that an open manhole after unintentionally escaping a great many situations (falling bricks, speeding cars) that could’ve spelled an even more premature doom. We just see the guy’s body vanish through the hole, though later we do see his body—barely hanging on—in a hospital bed.

New, disembodied souls resemble squishy little balls, and they’re sometimes thrown or smashed. But the souls, not having any bodies (much less nerve-endings to tweak), find it all rather fun.

A monstrous thing swallows a soul whole. A metaphysical ship sinks. We see some pratfalls and physical humor here and there. There’s a suggestion that 22 just might become a pyromaniac.

Crude or Profane Language

When Joe first arrives at the Great Before, he asks if he’s landed in “H-E-double hockey sticks?” The unborn souls around him, though, apparently know how to spell: They bounce around, repeating the word “hell” as a Jerry tries to explain to Joe where he is. Someone describes earth as a “hellish planet.” Besides that, we just hear a couple of uses of the word “butt.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Jazz clubs are typically drinking establishments, and I assume that’s true of the one that Dorthea Williams and her band are playing. We don’t see anyone drink, though.

Other Negative Elements

Immortal souls have no bodies, which means that food does them little good. Joe and 22 demonstrate this by each devouring a piece of pizza and having it eject—still fully formed—from their other end.

Joe lies, and both he and 22 try to game the system to get what they want. A joke alludes to body odor. Joe takes a shower, and someone mentions his rear.

I’ll just say it: A bad Pixar movie is about as common as a Latin-speaking lemming.

It’s not just the studio’s craftsmanship: It’s the storytellers’ ambition . Not content with doling out beautiful ruminations about grief and love and responsibility, Pixar dove directly into the world of emotion and feeling itself with Inside Out back in 2015. (Was it really that long ago?) Now, the animation pioneers have moved on from the heart and into the Soul .

But while the movie does indeed paint its story using many a spiritual and metaphysical brush, Soul isn’t aiming to save anyone’s. It’s far more concerned with this world than the next one, delving into one big question: What makes us tick? Or maybe more fairly, What makes us feel alive?

Neither Joe nor 22 really understand what “life” is, or what it should be. Joe has spent most of his waiting for one big moment, letting so many little ones slip by. No. 22 has never lived at all, and she can’t figure out why she’d even want to. Both characters have, in their own ways, locked themselves into a closet of secure sameness . They need to learn from each other how to use the key.

Certainly, Christian families will want to be aware of the movie’s spiritual elements before deciding to watch; and you should be prepared to talk about the story’s provocative ideas afterward. As noted, the story’s spiritual conceits here have little connection to traditional Christian understandings of these important questions.

Still, Soul strives to help us remember that life itself is a blessing, even when it doesn’t go as we planned. It tells us that lives of service can be just as rewarding as lives on stage. It encourages us to look at the world’s humblest things, be it a maple seed or a hunk of pizza crust, as something amazing—perhaps even miraculous in its own right.

Soul tells us that life isn’t just a matter of a beating heart, of drawing breath, of shuffling through each second as if we had an eternity of them. Our lives are a gift. And Christians watching this film can take it a step farther: Our lives are a gift from God.

How appropriate that his movie should be released on Disney+ on Christmas Day. It tells us that very moment, after all, is a present—and one we should open with glee.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Why am I Here?

Why am I here? What is my purpose? What is the meaning of life? These questions have plagued humans since the beginning. We all want to feel useful, and we want to know that we have something to contribute. While Soul appears to explore these questions, most parents want to know more about this movie before allowing their children to watch. This Disney Pixar Soul Christian Movie Review is designed to give you the information you need before viewing the movie.

Pixar Animation Studios’ Soul explores What makes you…YOU. The main character, Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) is a jazz musician, but is currently a middle-school band teacher until he can get his big break. He wants to be a jazz pianist. On the day he is hired for the gig of his lifetime, he finds himself in the afterlife after falling down an open manhole.

Joe is not ready to leave the earth and escapes the final ascent into the Great Beyond by hiding in The Great Before where new souls are prepared before entering the Earth. Joe is assigned Soul 22 (Tina Fey) and tries to convince her to go to Earth. On the journey to teach Soul 22 what is so great about living, he discovers answers himself.

Christian Mom Movie Review of Pixar Soul: The Good:

This movie explores themes that many people never talk about. Pete Doctor, Director of Soul, is a Christian. While this movie appears to look at what happens after you die, it actually is a movie about purpose and passion.

Doctor says, “…there’s more to living than a singular passion—as expressive and fulfilling as that may be. Sometimes the small insignificant things are what it’s really about. I remember one day I was biking and I stopped and picked a raspberry. It was warmed by the sun and became the most amazing raspberry I ever had. I still remember that nearly-nothing moment vividly. Almost any moment in our lives could be a transcendental moment that defines why we’re here.”

The entire theme of the movie, Soul, is about our essence outside of our body. Obviously, this movie will explore spiritual questions and ideas.

This is definitely not a kids movie. There are moments that are slow-moving, but more importantly, the content of the movie is too philosophical for most children and most likely will not hold their attention.

Language: The word hellish is spoken as is the word hell; however, it is in reference to the place.

Lost souls are portrayed as dark and scary at times.

Since this movie deals with after life, there are scenes that may be upsetting to children who have lost loved ones.

Some characters lie and try to cheat the system.

What Parents May Want to Know:

Soul explores spiritual themes. Some of these theme are inconsistent with Christianity, however, other concepts delve into things that are unknown and are just conjecture.

There are also references to meditating and chakras. This movie includes sprinklings of different religious beliefs regarding the human soul.

Christian Mom Reviews Pixar Soul Movie: Additional Thoughts:

Five years ago, I would have told you, “You die and go to heaven or hell after you die.” However, after my husband’s cardiac arrest, I have more unanswered questions than I have answers. Where was my husband for those 15 minutes when his body was dead? Did he get to come back or was the choice made for him? I don’t know if I will ever get those questions answered this side of eternity.

Ironically, while this movie is about the soul and the Great Beyond, little about this movie actually talks about how to ensure you get to the Great Beyond. It is more about making sure you figure out what makes you YOU in the here and now! As a Christian, I believe we are made of body, soul and spirit. If you are unsure of the differences, Christianity.com has an explanation that breaks it down.

Teaching with SOUL:

What is your purpose:.

My Christian Mom Movie reviews ( read my movie review guidelines ) would not be complete without leaving you something to teach or explore with your children. This Pixar movie was originally released on December 25, 2020, streaming on Disney+. Obviously, for the Christian family, the birth of Jesus is our focus on Christmas Day. However, we also want to help our children find their passion. Why am I here? As Christians, we are here to glorify God. Talk to your children about how we best glorify God.

Since I believe that we each glorify God by living out the life He put us on earth for, this will look different for each and every one of us. Pete Doctor remembers a sun-kissed raspberry, but since I hate raspberries that would never be on my inspirational moments.

WHAT DOES GOD’S WORD SAY ABOUT THE AFTERLIFE?

Discuss and research what the Bible says about the afterlife. This Christianity Today article answers some questions you may have.

INSPIRATIONAL MOMENTS:

Help your children identify inspirational moments and record those moments.

Think about a moment in your life that was that amazing. One such moment for me was drinking the best strawberry milkshake of my life in a small diner on an island near an army base in upstate Washington. All I thought is that I wanted to bring my husband back to share this experience. I drank that milkshake in 1990-something.

While the movie Soul has a great jazz legend Dorothea Williams, she is not a real person. Study great jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald or Duke Ellington.

Additionally, research where jazz music began (New Orleans), but its roots began in Africa and Europe. The African American Culture is the birthplace of jazz.

Jazz music is deeply steeped in black culture taking the sounds of Africa and adding European instruments.

BUCKET LISTS:

Finding and sharing an amazing strawberry milkshake with the love of my life is a bucket list item for me! What are bucket list items? Have your children make a list of things they want to do before they grow up, get married, etc. Do you have a list? Show your children your list.

Additionally, moments from your life with your children that have been amazing. Consider doing an activity with your children where you celebrate the amazing moments. We have done a jar of stones with dates and a brief explanation. The children have also done their own memory boxes.

No matter which one you choose to do, make sure to include days that are amazing to you that other people will not understand such as the greatest strawberry milkshake. Teaching your children to identify moments that are special to them will help them see there isn’t just one thing that defines their life. While one good moment doesn’t define your life, one bad moment doesn’t have to either!

MY VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS :

Soul is a difficult movie and explores such deep concepts that I would not recommend this movie to anyone younger than 10 years old. However, Soul can be a great springboard for discussing what your family and religion believe about the afterlife. Additionally, Soul has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 95%.

About the Movie:

Rating: PG for thematic elements and some language

Release Date: December 25, 2020 straight to streaming on Disney+. Finally, Soul gets a theatrical release on January 12, 2024.

Runtime: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Genre: Fantasy/Comedy

Style: Animated Movie

Studio: Pixar Animation Studio

Director: Pete Docter

Written by: Peter Docter, Mike Jones, Kemp Powers

Produced by: Dana Murray

Edited by: Kevin Nolting

Music by: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Jon Batiste

Distributed by: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

The Cast of Soul:

Joe Gardner voiced by Jamie Foxx

Dorothea Williams voiced by Angela Bassett

22 voiced by Tina Fey

Moonwind voiced by Graham Norton

Terry voiced by Rachel House

Jerry (soul counselors in the Great Before) voiced by Alice Braga, Richard Ayoade, Wes Studi, Fortune Feimster, and Zenobia Shroff

Libba Gardner (Joe’s mother) voiced by Phylicia Rashad

Dez (Joe’s Barber) voiced by Donnell Rawlings

Lamont “Curley” Baker voiced by Questlove

SPOILER ALERT:

In this Pixar film, Joe and Soul 22 come to earth. But Joe returns in a cat, and 22 is in Joe’s body. Much of the movie deals with the area between earth and eternity.

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Catholic Review

Inspiring the Archdiocese of Baltimore

Movie Review: ‘Soul’

NEW YORK (CNS) — As the director of such films as “Up” (2009) and 2015’s “Inside Out,” Pete Docter has taken cartoons to the heights of artistry, proving that an animated feature can be touching, emotionally rich and memorable.

And that’s to say nothing of his involvement in the four “Toy Story” movies.

So it’s disappointing to find that his latest project, “Soul” (Disney), a blend of drama and comedy, while often funny, fails to make a similar impact. Although mostly free of objectionable material, moreover, the picture’s treatment of subjects of grave significance makes it potentially confusing for impressionable viewers.

In part, that’s a result of the ambitious goal Docter and his co-writers, Mike Jones and Kemp Powers (also Docter’s co-director), have established for themselves. Much of “Soul,” it turns out, is set in a supernatural realm made up of both a Great Beyond and a Great Before.

Visiting each in turn, albeit involuntarily, is our earthly protagonist, Joe Gardner (voice of Jamie Foxx).

A middle school music teacher who yearns to be a jazz pianist, Joe gets his big break when he’s invited to join the highly regarded quartet led by saxophonist Dorothea Williams (voice of Angela Bassett). Just before his first performance with them, however, an accident leaves Joe’s body in a coma and sends his spirit into the afterlife.

Unwilling to resign his corporeal existence at such a promising moment, Joe tries to escape going to heaven but winds up instead in the domain where the personalities of future babies are formed. There, he’s assigned to mentor a soul called 22 (voice of Tina Fey) a patience-exhausting pupil who has stubbornly refused to be born for centuries.

The duo’s relationship leads to new insights for each. And “Soul” ultimately sends the positive messages that life is well worth living and that its meaning transcends an individual’s professional accomplishments.

Although it’s understandable that the filmmakers feel bound to portray the spiritual arena in a nondenominal way in order to avoid offending religious sensibilities, the result feels sterile. In place of angels, for instance, we get cubist-style figures who identify themselves as — more or less — the sum of all the laws of physics.

To the extent that any belief system is represented, the unfortunate choice falls on the New Age movement. Thus, during a sojourn in yet another nonphysical region, the Astral Plane, Joe receives guidance from a middle-aged hippie called Moonwind (voice of Graham Norton) and from the various shamans by whom he’s surrounded.

The idea that human souls exist before conception was condemned as heretical by the Second Council of Constantinople in the sixth century. So, while grown-ups and well-catechized older teens can be counted on to recognize the presence of this notion in “Soul” as no more than a fictional device and a means of introducing the audience to cute talking babies, kids likely cannot.

If youngsters are anxious to watch the movie, parents could make it the springboard for a family discussion about life after death and related matters. But they should be aware going in that there’s a lot on screen that needs to be sorted through with discernment and care.

The film contains mature themes, a couple of mild oaths and a single crass term. The Catholic News Service classification is A-III — adults. The Motion Picture Association rating is PG — parental guidance suggested. Some material may not be suitable for children.

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Father James Martin talks with the creator of Pixar’s ‘Soul’ about finding God in all things

Recently, Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture hosted a virtual conversation between Pete Docter of Pixar and James Martin, S.J., of America Media. Mr. Docter, the chief creative officer at Pixar, co-wrote and directed “Soul,” which premiered on Disney+ at Christmas and wrestles with questions of the afterlife.

Mr. Docter grew up Lutheran and is now Presbyterian, and his interest in the questions posed by his own Christian faith led him to research a variety of faith traditions while writing “Soul.” He was particularly inspired by Father Martin’s book The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything , and its insights about Ignatian spirituality greatly influenced the film’s ultimate message.

Their conversation, which can be viewed below, covered everything from Father Martin’s book to the making of the film to Mr. Docter’s own struggles with being a Christian working in film and animation today.

Since he is not Catholic himself, Mr. Docter said he appreciated “how accessible and inspiring and useful” the ideas and explanations in The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything were. He was particularly moved by the idea of “finding God in all things,” which he and Father Martin agreed was present in the film’s reverence and appreciation for the small things that can bring great hope.

Mr. Docter was also inspired by Ignatian concepts of freedom and detachment. His main character, a jazz musician, gets the chance of a lifetime when he plays in a concert with a jazz legend; but, as Mr. Docter described, “he’s still the same guy at the end.” As a writer, Mr. Docter resonated with this notion because of the disappointment he felt when his professional triumphs did not bring him the sense of fulfillment he had anticipated.

Pete Docter was inspired by Father Martin’s book The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything and its insights about Ignatian spirituality.

“I guess somewhere in the back of my head was this idea that I have to earn my way to being loved. That someday, if I do a good enough job, my life will be complete,” he said as he described the “unsettled” feeling he experienced after the overwhelming success of his films, which at the time included “Monsters, Inc.,” “Up” and “Inside Out.”

Father Martin shared a similar experience he had had after publishing his book. As a young Jesuit, he considered writing a book to be the pinnacle of accomplishment. But when he published his own years later, he looked at it sitting on his desk and thought “these material things are not going to be satisfying.”

Also formative were insights in Father Martin’s book derived from his fellow Jesuit and spiritual teacher Anthony De Mello, S.J. Mr. Docter and Father Martin discussed one of Father De Mello’s parables that was included in The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything and was told by one of the characters in “Soul.”

By creating “Soul,” Mr. Docter made a parable of his own, Father Martin suggested.

Father Martin and Mr. Doctor also discussed the ways in which the drive to find success and purpose in American life can distort the Christian notion of vocation. As Mr. Docter put it: “I feel like you’re given a sense of something you’re really good at and passionate for. But I think a lot of us make the mistake that that somehow becomes like self-defining or that there’s something to be achieved. The message of the film is really trying to tease those two things apart…. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a jazz musician or a cartoonist or whatever, but that doesn’t have to be the totality of who you are in the world.”

Father Martin added: “If you are what you do, if that’s taken away from you, or if at the end of your life you don’t have an active profession, then you feel like you’re nothing. And I think that’s what’s so hard for some people, especially, you know, if they’re unemployed, or they feel like they’re not sort of successful in the eyes of the world, they don’t feel like they’re valuable.”

Mr. Docter shared his hesitation to openly express his Christian faith for fear of being judged or having his work labeled. But with such a clear depiction of spiritual themes in “Soul,” he said, “this film has sort of forced me to out myself a little bit more, in a good way.”

By creating “Soul,” Mr. Docter made a parable of his own, Father Martin suggested. They agreed about the power of storytelling to facilitate better communication and deeper connections. “I think that’s where the conversion comes. And I think that’s what Jesus knew,” Father Martin said.

Mr. Docter said that he had heard from faith leaders of various backgrounds, Christian and non-Christian alike, who said that they saw tenets of their faith in the film. “Either we were so vague that we appeal to everybody, or we found something kind of deeper...at the core of these things,” he said.

Father Martin’s work and the teaching of other spiritual leaders is indeed embedded in the storytelling of “Soul,” both directly and subtly, its themes accessible and thought-provoking for people of all faiths.

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Movie Review: Soul (2020)

Vincent Gaine
Movie Reviews
--> January 16, 2021

Why am I here? What is the meaning of my existence? What happens when I die? What is the mind? What is my personality? Why am I? Deep and profound questions, well suited to a long cinematic chin-stroker such as Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” and Terrence Malick’s “ The Tree of Life .” Or a swift, snappy animated comedy adventure about a jazz musician. Wait, what?

Sure enough, Pixar have done it again. In Pete Docter’s Soul , these weighty questions are explored in a dazzling and sublime ride of visual imagination. Jazz musician and teacher Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx, “ Baby Driver ”) finds himself heading for the Great Beyond, his soul confronting the end of his life just as he found what he believes to be the reason for it. Rather than face the Great Beyond, Joe flees into the Great Before, a training ground where souls develop personalities before they join bodies. In a desperate attempt to get back to his body on Earth, Joe attempts to mentor Soul 22 (voiced by Tina Fey, “ Muppets Most Wanted ”), a soul with no spark who cares about nothing. Cue hilarity, bonding and (literally) life lessons.

Anyone with a fondness for creativity such as art, performance or, of course, music, will find Joe relatable, chasing after his big chance for years before finally getting it, only to lose out on this chance due to unexpected events. Notably, there are sequences in the film that express a transcendent experience, in Joe’s case related to music. Crucially, however, an understanding of, or passion for, music is not essential, as the feeling being expressed is intangible and universal while also being unique. This is a remarkable balance to strike, and Docter along with co-director Kemp Powers do so by trusting in the image. Soul provides dialogue exposition for the soul dimensions, often delivered to a comically uncomprehending Joe, but sweeping pan shots, shifts in lighting and the fluid motion of Joe’s fingers on the piano create the sense of an elevated experience. This is cinema in its highest form, demonstrating the limitless potential of animation especially, as Soul emphasizes that an experience, of many varieties, can take someone to another place. Along the way, the film shows a variety of such experiences, as well as the reverse in the form of lost souls, featuring in sequences that are as moving as the death of Bambi’s mother or Mufasa in “The Lion King.” Throughout, the creativity of the animation is spellbinding, making the otherworldly places as well as the souls themselves completely believable and engaging.

For Pixar to deal with such subject matter is not without precedent. “ WALL-E ” used robots and programming to pose questions over the meaning of existence; “ Toy Story 3 ” confronted mortality and obsolescence; “ Inside Out ” told audiences of all ages that it is OK to be sad and that growth and change are healthy. Soul is, therefore, a continuation of the studio’s experiments with the medium of animation. The Great Before is rendered (and explained to be rendered) in such a way as to be comprehensible to Joe’s mind, and therefore the viewer’s (and of course the creators, who are themselves only human). This makes the spiritual realm charming and funny but also wondrous. The various counselors, all called Jerry because reasons, appear out of the surrounding space, overtly other and yet understandable. Docter and Powers, along with their fellow screenwriter Mike Jones, use a tried and tested method of presenting the organization of the spirit world as highly bureaucratic, recalling “Beetlejuice,” “O Heavenly Dog!” and especially “A Matter of Life and Death,” a clear influence on Soul . This bureaucracy is the source of much humor in the film, as records, statistics, training techniques and dealing with difficult colleagues receive ample attention. Furthermore, an unexpected development in the second act leads to some fantastic physical comedy that echoes “All of Me” among others. Many lessons are learned, some involving further colorful characters including Moonwind (voiced by Graham Norton, “ I Could Never Be Your Woman ”) and Curley (voiced by Questlove, “ Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest ”). Meanwhile, Joe and 22 make for a great comedy double act in the spirit of Woody and Buzz, Mike and Sully, Dory and Marlin, Joy and Sadness. All the voice performances are great, the characters richly nuanced and detailed.

In addition, Soul deserves attention for being the first Pixar film to feature an African-American lead. It is notable that Powers’ involvement increased from consultant to co-writer to Pixar’s first African American co-director, but at no point does the film make an emphatic political point. Rather, it allows the artistry to express the political progression by making Soul partially a film about the black community. This includes the setting, the supporting characters, an insightful scene that takes place in a barber’s, and of course the use of jazz. The film has been criticized for “whitewashing” blackness, as the soul figures are bereft of color. But it is notable that Joe’s appearance is retained in his soul, including his hat and glasses, whereas 22 and the other trainee souls are essentially blank, rather than presenting the color of white people as some kind of default. This design choice reinforces the film’s conceit that personality shapes appearance rather than the other way around, and people need to be seen as people, each with personalities and their own unique spark. In terms of progressive representation, imagine if that was how we saw everyone, as a person, an individual, each capable of our own extraordinary contribution.

Tagged: cat , death , jazz , musician , relationships , self-discovery

Dr. Vincent M. Gaine is a film and television researcher. His first book, Existentialism and Social Engagement in the Films of Michael Mann was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2011. His work on film and media has been published in Cinema Journal and The Journal of Technology , Theology and Religion , as well as edited collections including The 21st Century Superhero and The Directory of World Cinema .

Movie Review: It Lives Inside (2023) Movie Review: The Inhabitant (2022) Movie Review: The Man from Rome (2022) Movie Review: The Breach (2022) Movie Review: Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) Movie Review: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) Movie Review: The Batman (2022)

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"The Great Beyond Is Not So Great"

What You Need To Know:

Miscellaneous Immorality: Lying, deception, severe anger, and meanness.

More Detail:

SOUL, Pixar and Disney’s new animated comedy, is about a black music teacher who’s never made it big and finally has the chance to play with a famous jazz singer, but he unexpectedly dies and has to fix things in “the Great Before” to return to Earth and fulfill his purpose. SOUL has a very confusing plotline that’s filled with New Age and Hindu content and sadly isn’t as well done as Pixar’s movie INSIDE OUT.

The movie opens with a black music teacher, Joe, trying to teach his high school class about jazz. (It should be noted that this reviewer loves jazz, and the movie’s jazz references are very good.) Joe has never been able to land a gig, and his mother has never wanted him to be a jazz musician, because his father was a poor jazz musician, and so she had to support the family.

On the day Joe’s given the news that he’s been accepted as a full time teacher, with all the accompanying perks and benefits, he gets a call form Curly, one of his former students, that he has a big break to audition on the piano for the famous jazz musician, Dorothea Williams. When he auditions, his wonderful jazz riff impresses Dorothea, so she hires him for the night.

Rushing back to his apartment, Joe falls through a manhole and dies. Suddenly, he’s on an escalator to Heaven and starts trying to get away from Heaven and return to his earthly existence while pushing other people out of the way.

Instead of returning to Earth, Joe he falls into the “Great Before,” which is where baby souls are given their personality. When they get all of their personality traits, they get born on Earth. Joe tries to jump through the portal to Earth but keeps getting sent back.

At this point, an angel named Jerry mistakes Joe for a mentor, giving him the identity of a psychiatrist and assigning him the most difficult baby soul, 22, in the Great Before who doesn’t want to go to Earth and has frustrated every mentor for hundreds of years. Baby soul 22 leads Joe through another portal, where baby souls have a gigantic city of various personality traits from which to choose. Joe can’t get 22 interested any of the personality traits, however. They go through another portal into the Zone, where there’s some depressed souls that have never been born. The depressed souls walk around like big dark blobs.

Joe and the baby soul come upon an astral sailing ship commanded by Moonwind, a man who’s actually alive on a street corner in New York City swinging an advertising sign. This guru makes it possible for Joe and the baby soul, Number 22, to return to Earth, but 22 mistakenly inhabits Joe’s body in the hospital, and Joe inhabits a fat cat’s body on Joe’s hospital bed. Now, the real Joe fat cat needs to get 22 in Joe’s body prepared for the big debut with Dorothea Williams.

Meanwhile, in the Great Beyond, the record keeping angel, Terry, realizes he’s missing one deceased soul. So, he comes to Earth to find Joe and get him back to the Great Beyond. Through a lot of complications, another death, another coming back to his body, and all sorts of other problems, Joe tries to get to his jazz performance. He also tries to find 22’s last personality trait and to find both of their purposes in life.

Some moments in SOUL are very imaginative and raise important questions about the afterlife, but they’re marred irreparably by the movie’s preponderance of Hindu and New Age references and by the very ugly events that occur in the Zone and even on Earth. SOUL is more of an arthouse movie and, as such, has gotten some good reviews. However, children will be frightened as well as misled by some of the movie’s themes. Audiences may also not find it funny and may find it hard to understand, because the plot is too disjointed.

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Movie Review: Soul

In Articles , Culture , Music & Movies by Steven Sukkau April 30, 2021

With an uncharacteristically ambiguous ending, Disney’s Pixar digs into deeper questions about what it means to be human with another colorful, thoughtful film, Soul .

Pixar Comes Close

There’s a lot to take in here, both as a viewer and a Christian. Soul is a gorgeous film, beautifully animated and featuring a smashing soundtrack. While it’s fascinating to see Pixar create a story about emotions and the human brain in a film like Inside Out , it’s a bit uncomfortable to see the filmmakers tackle life after death.

While there’s some tongue-in-cheek references to heaven and hell, the film mostly depicts a banal in-between spiritual plane filled with familiar Sunday School imagery of a heaven-like realm in the clouds: calm, dutiful spiritual beings that act as angelic guardians, even brooding “lost souls” that represent people who’ve lost sight of their purpose on earth.

The movie certainly muses on the importance of living well and embracing the smaller moments in life, but it may take some extra explanation for younger viewers. We are not accidental beings taking in the sights on earth just to enter the next life if we remembered to stop and smell the roses. In fact, we are precious children of God created to do good works; good works he prepared for us beforehand.

Soul is another artful film with an uplifting message and theme, but one that fails to point to the source of goodness and life. We are works of art being formed by God’s hands. As Romans 12 reveals, the big moments and mundane are gifts we offer to our Creator, and he brings meaning and purpose to them all as he leads, prepares and enables us. Pixar comes close with their latest offering, but without a Creator, their depiction of the afterlife ends up feeling a little hollow.

Soul is another artful film with an uplifting message and theme, but one that fails to point to the source of goodness and life.

Soul follows the life and near-death of middle-aged band teacher and jazz musician Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) as he struggles to reconcile his big dreams with the soul -crushing nature of everyday life. We see him as a passionate artist dedicated to his craft, evidenced by his commitment to sporadic gigs that could lead to a big break. But he is chained to the somewhat demeaning, if greatly impactful, day job as a middle school band teacher.

In his parents, we see the tension between living our dreams and making concessions to survive; Joe’s father was also a soulful, aspiring musician, while his mother’s no-nonsense approach to the practicalities of life, along with her work ethic, kept their family fed and clothed when music wasn’t paying the bills.

However, despite his reluctance, we see hints that Joe is actually a gifted educator as he inspires the young people around him. One, in particular, has even gone on to work professionally as a musician and gets Joe a shot at his dream, recommending him to the legendary jazz artist Dorothea Williams.

His entire life’s purpose seemingly comes together as he kills the audition and runs home to prepare for his first concert in the big leagues. His dream comes crashing down, literally, when he falls into an open manhole and ends up as a cute and colourful representation of his soul in the Great Beyond. Unable to accept his fate, he resists entering eternity and flees to another space the movie affectionately refers to as the Great Before, a fluffy cloud playground where souls have their personalities and passions shaped before being sent to earth.

Part of a soul’s formation is being paired up with a mentor who has lived and died. In a bid to return to earth, Joe hatches a plan to mentor a resistant soul known only by a number, “22” (Tina Fey) who is content on never leaving her spiritual incubator.

Everything goes wildly off the rails, as you might expect, but Joe does eventually succeed in returning to his body and nailing his concert, thus fulfilling his supposed life’s purpose. However, afterwards, he tells his idol, Dorothea Williams that he imagined he would’ve felt “different”.

She tells Joe the story of a young fish looking for the Ocean. An older, wiser fish explains they’ve already arrived, but the young fish replies, “But this is only water.”

Joe begins to realize that life is made up of big moments, but also smaller moments. The true danger and stakes of the story, and life, are actually transforming your passion from a selfless gift into a selfish obsession.

In fact, it’s Joe’s gift as an educator and ability to reach difficult youth that saves 22 from her fear of inadequacy and prepares her to start her life on earth.

Along the way, Joe learns to both embrace the Great Beyond and appreciate the small moments in life. It’s here that the filmmakers specifically chose to end on an ambiguous beat. Joe is granted the chance to return to earth, but we aren’t privy to whether he tours full-time, goes back to teaching band, or is reunited with 22.

Content in the Tension

In the end, the filmmakers perhaps rightly decided that those details aren’t important. In fact, that’s the point. Regardless of what life had in store for Joe, whether he pursued a love interest, or embarked on a hybrid schedule of part-time teaching and performing, he was now mature enough to appreciate the big moments, as well as the small moments.

I think that’s the beauty of Soul . Its message isn’t a binary recommendation of either blindly pursuing passion or settling for smaller dreams; life is big and beautiful inside the tension between them. In fact, that is where the texture and colour of life happen – in the dreaming and longing, the working and resting. To be content in that tension, and remain grateful for each moment, is the lesson every soul must learn.

Steven Sukkau

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Disney pixar’s soul movie review.

So, I watched Disney’s Pixar movie ‘SOUL’ starring Jamie Foxx and Tina Fey on Disney+ with my three little children for a family movie night on 12/28. As expected, Disney intentionally filled the movie with magical/spirit-world foolishness. Christian parents please be beware of Disney movies and shows. Don’t be led astray by wanting to support black artists. Disney has an agenda to indoctrinate our children with worldliness and the occult to try and turn their hearts from God. Pray and use caution. This is my reaction… Please like, share, comment, subscribe, and hit the bell icon for more!

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'Soul': Movie Review

Soul : movie review.

Animated, Fantasy

December 25, 2020

Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Graham Norton, Rachel House, Alice Braga, Richard Ayoade, Phylicia Rashad, Angela Bassett, Wes Studi

Pete Docter

Walt Disney Pictures

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‘Soul’ Is the Anti-Disney Disney Movie

More By Dustin Crowe

Christians won’t agree with much of what Soul depicts about souls, the afterlife, or spirituality in general. There’s a lot of bad theology and problematic pop spirituality in the movie. But while the film gets plenty wrong, it also gets some important things right. Soul affirms life and the existence of purpose and meaning. It critiques much of the naturalism, materialism, and expressive individualism prevalent today, and in a surprising way it challenges the Disney movie dogma often promoted by its predecessors.

Directed by Pete Doctor and Kemp Powers, Soul tells the story of Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), an African American middle-school band teacher who dreams of making it as a jazz pianist. After an accident puts him into a near-death “holding pattern” coma, we’re taken on a journey with his soul as he explores life and death, where souls go (The Great Beyond), and where souls come from (The Great Before). A not-yet-born soul named 22 (Tina Fey)—who is avoiding an embodied life on Earth—joins Joe in this story. Though each of them begins from different starting points—Joe not wanting to die and 22 not wanting to live—both discover that “all this living is worth dying for.”

Death Is Unavoidable. Life Is Precious.

While death resides in the background of many Disney movies—usually a lost parent(s)—it has recently become more foregrounded ( example: Coco ) and takes center stage in Soul . Death can strike anywhere, at any time, for anyone. Just as he finally gets his big break—a chance to play with jazz legend Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett)—Joe falls into a manhole.

In this fallen world, death’s pervasiveness haunts life. It looms in the shadows of our whole existence, always on our heels. But as we learn in the Bible, living with an awareness life’s fragility (James 4:13–17; Prov. 27:1; Ps. 39:4), and living with the end in mind, helps us live faithfully in the present (Eccl. 7:8–9; Eph. 5:15–17). The bitterness of death helps us savor the sweetness of life.

Life is a vapor, as 2020 made us all painfully aware. Even if we don’t agree with everything in Soul , we can affirm its primary message: life is precious, valuable, and purposeful.

Even if we don’t agree with everything in Soul , we can affirm its primary message: life is precious, valuable, and purposeful.

Joe’s life isn’t a fairy tale; it’s real, relatable, wonderfully mundane. His life isn’t the one he dreamed about, yet it’s still good and inherently precious. Throughout the film Joe fights to hold on to his life, and his will to live piques 22’s curiosity. “Your life is so sad and pathetic, and you’re working so hard to get back to it,” she tells Joe, reflecting modern cynicism about life. But through her experiences with Joe, she discovers life is worth living. The existential question she poses in the barber shop, “Is dying worth living for?” is answered with a resounding “Yes!” as she finally sees the joy, beauty, and wonder of life.

In a world where life is increasingly seen as meaningless and easily discarded, Soul compellingly assures us: life is a precious gift.

Anti-Disney Disney Movie

In some ways, Soul is the anti-Disney Disney movie. Whereas most recent Disney movies tell me to find my purpose by looking within (self-discovery) and chasing my dream at all costs (self-actualization), Soul takes a different approach.

One of Joe’s key learnings is that “a passion is not a purpose.” Our dreams and sparks of inspiration are important, but they’re not why we exist. Part of Joe’s confusion and misguided quest is his assumption that his passion (jazz) is his reason for living. He explains to his mother that this is why he was born; it’s his reason to live.

One of the characters, a barbershop owner named Dez, helps Joe and 22 understand the distinction between passion and purpose. Dez dreamed of being a veterinarian, not a barber. But Dez enjoys being a barber, including the small acts of helping people, meeting interesting characters, and providing a listening ear to anyone who sits in his chair. It doesn’t have to be your best life now to be a beautiful life worth living.

It doesn’t have to be your best life now to be a beautiful life worth living.

Joe and 22 come to see that some of life’s greatest joys aren’t the big things we dream about but the little blessings—even the struggles and challenges—we encounter in everyday life. There is joy in the ordinary and meaning in the here-and-now, not just in our “happily ever after” fairy tales about the future. This seeming deviation from the Disney canon is an essential part of the story. In order to be happy, we don’t have to drop everything and follow our heart to the one thing we think will make us happy. Wherever God has us, we can find purpose—and this purpose doesn’t depend on our passions.

A second example of the film’s understanding of purpose is that it exists outside of us rather than inside of us. Joe doesn’t create his own purpose; he enters a world where meaning exists independent of him. The film’s worldview might not be Christian, but (intentionally or not) it affirms transcendent realities about a world neither devoid of purpose nor reduced to subjective constructions of meaning.

For many kids today who have grown up in the “follow your heart” era (often perpetuated by Disney films), where the burden of purpose and self-worth depends on the extent to which they can express themselves uniquely (and be affirmed by others), Soul ’s message comes as a breath of freeing fresh air.

When Passion Becomes Obsession

Another valuable lesson in Soul is that our passions (things that “spark joy”) can become idols when they become sources of ultimate satisfaction, security, or meaning. While passions can be good gifts, they make bad gods.

In one of the “beyond” realms Joe explores, there’s a place where “lost souls” wander, some who have turned their passion (that which puts us in “the zone”) into idols. The guide in this realm (Moonwind) explains, “The zone is enjoyable, but when that joy becomes an obsession, one does become disconnected from life.” We see a wandering soul scanning for his passion like a man with a metal-detector desperate to find a treasure. When we define our purpose by a single passion, we lose both.

Wherever God has us, we can find purpose—and this purpose doesn’t depend on our passions.

Joe learns this firsthand when he shrinks his life’s significance down to his passion to be a successful jazz musician. It crushes him under the weight, and ultimately leaves him disappointed. “I’ve been waiting on this day for my entire life,” he says when he gets to play in Dorothea’s band. “I thought I’d feel different.” Passions taste bitter when we mistakenly believe they can satisfy our hunger. But once Joe returns home, feeling disappointed and empty, he plays his piano simply for the pleasure of it, enjoying jazz for its own sake. When the gift remains a gift, rather than a carrier of all his hopes and dreams, he finds joy in it again.

This lesson revises the Disney ethos a bit. Life’s magic and meaning isn’t primarily found by looking within for a spark, talent, or passion that needs to be expressed. Instead, maybe it’s found by looking around us at the beauty of the world we’ve been given—and then looking up , with awe and gratitude, at the Giver.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

Dustin Crowe serves as pastor of discipleship at Pennington Park Church in Fishers, Indiana. You can follow him on Twitter or visit his blog . He’s the author of The Grumbler’s Guide to Giving Thanks: Reclaiming the Gifts of a Lost Spiritual Discipline .

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Pixar's "Soul" is about a jazz pianist who has a near-death experience and gets stuck in the afterlife, contemplating his choices and regretting the existence that he mostly took for granted. Pixar veteran Pete Docter is the credited co-director, alongside playwright and screenwriter Kemp Powers , who wrote Regina King's outstanding "One Night in Miami." Despite its weighty themes, the project has a light touch. A musician might liken "Soul" to an extended riff, or a five-finger exercise, which is very much in the spirit of jazz, an improvisation-centered art that's honorably and accurately depicted onscreen whenever Joe or another musician character starts to perform.

The prologue peaks with Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx ) falling into an open manhole and ending up comatose in a hospital. It's a bummer twist ending to a great day in which Joe was finally offered a staff job at his school, then nailed an audition with a visiting jazz legend named Dorothea Williams ( Angela Bassett ) who had invited him to play with her that night. After his near-lethal pratfall, Joe's soul is sent to the Great Beyond—basically a cosmic foyer with a long walkway, where souls line up before heading toward a white light. Joe isn't ready for The End, so he flees in the other direction, falls off the walkway, and ends up in a brightly colored yet still-purgatorial zone known as The Great Before.

The Great Before is a bit like the setting of Albert Brooks' metaphysical comedy " Defending Your Life ." It has its own rules and procedures, and is part of a larger spiritual ecosystem wherein certain things have to happen for other things to happen. There's a touch of video game structure/plotting to the entire premise, and it's reinforced by the stylized drawing of Great Before characters in supervisory positions over mentors and proto-souls: they're two-dimensional, shape-shifting Cubist figures made of elegant neon lines.

The purpose of the Great Before is to mentor fresh souls so that they can discover a "spark" that will drive them to a happy and productive life down on earth. Joe is motivated mainly by a desire to avoid the white light and get back to earth somehow (and play that amazing gig he'd been waiting his whole life for), so he assumes the identity of an acclaimed Swedish psychologist and mentors a problem blip known only by her number, 22 ( Tina Fey ). Twenty-two is a blasé cynic who has rejected mentorship from some of the greatest figures in mortal history, including Carl Jung and Abraham Lincoln. Can Joe break the streak and help her find her purpose? Have you ever seen a Pixar film before? Of course. It's mainly about how things happen in these films, rarely about what happens.

That having been said, there's a nifty comic twist about halfway through the film that livens up "Soul" just when it was starting to drag, and it's best not to spoil it here (even though trailers and ads already have). Suffice to say that 22 eventually does find her spark, although it takes a lot of effort and more than a few wild misadventures to get there; and that Joe reexamines his years on earth as a genial but meek teacher and finds them wanting. He didn't make as many friends as he should have and was consumed by fears that he traded his childhood dream of becoming a working jazz artist for a more ordinary life. (Joe's mother, played by Phylicia Rashad , is not supportive of his music.) The downside is that this turns "Soul" into another of a string of animated films (including " The Princess and the Frog " and " Spies in Disguise ") in which a rare Black leading character is transformed into something else for the majority of a film's running time.

Is this the first midlife crisis movie released by Pixar? Possibly, although Woody in the " Toy Story " films seemed to have a touch of that affliction as well. The movie is a bit shaggy and disorganized with its mythology/rules—something that Pixar is usually meticulous about, to the point of being obsessive. I'm not convinced it adds up to all much in the grand scheme by the time the final sequence arrives. The film's message could be summed up as, "Don't get so hung up on ambition that you forget to stop and smell the flowers." A birthday card could've told you that. And some of the jokes are a tad DreamWorksy, like the bit where a lost soul returns to earth and realizes that he's completely wasted his life by working in hedge funds; a ruthless international mega-corporation like Disney— which stuck most of its 20th Century Fox repertory holdings in a "vault" last year to push people to rent or purchase new Disney product, and that once sued day care centers for putting its characters on murals without permission—has no business lecturing anybody else about the moral emptiness of materialism.

And yet, " Cars " and its various derivatives aside, Pixar has never released a flat-out bad film. And this is a good one: pleasant and clever, with a generous heart, committed voice acting, and some of the kookiest images in Pixar history (including a ghostly, pink, land-bound pirate vessel belonging to a "mystic without borders," with tie-died sails, a peace symbol anchor, and Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" blasting on a continuous loop). The company has been entrenched at the center of popular culture for decades, its reputation fortified by animated features that blend innovative design and graphics, lively physical and verbal comedy, impeccably staged action, and a sensibility that one of my old college film textbooks called "sprezzatura"—described in Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 The Book of the Courtier as " ... a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art, and make whatever one does or says seem to be without effort, and almost without any thought about it." In other words, Pixar makes it all look easy, even when hundreds of people worked on the project long enough to justify a "production babies" section of the end credits.

Despite feeling like rather minor Pixar overall, "Soul" will prove to be of historical interest because, despite the transformation issue, and when it isn't getting wrapped up in goofy afterlife shenanigans, it's the most unapologetically Black Pixar project yet released. Its portrayal of jazz is not only accurate in terms of its soundtrack of classic cuts and depiction of performance (the piano and trumpet playing is as correct as anything in Spike Lee's " Mo' Better Blues ") but also its wider cultural context.

In a flashback, Joe's dad, who introduced him to jazz, describes the music as one of the greatest African-American contributions to world culture. There are many other touches in the film that testify to the story's anchoring in an experience beyond the white, middle-class suburban norms that Pixar embraces by default. There's even a visit to a Black barbershop showcasing an array of male hairstyles; a joke about the difficulty of a Black man hailing a taxi in New York City ("This would be hard even if I wasn't wearing a hospital gown!"); and a reference to Charles Drew, a Black physician credited with pioneering the blood transfusion. This distinction gives weight to lines that might not have registered in a Pixar film with white protagonists, such as 22's quip, "You can't crush a soul here. That's what life on earth is for."

Available on Disney+ on December 25.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Soul (2020)

Rated PG for thematic elements and some language.

102 minutes

Jamie Foxx as Joe Gardner (voice)

Tina Fey as 22 (voice)

Ahmir-Khalib Thompson as Curly (voice)

Phylicia Rashād as Libba Gardner (voice)

Daveed Diggs as Paul (voice)

John Ratzenberger as (voice)

Richard Ayoade as Jerry (voice)

Graham Norton as Moonwind (voice)

Rachel House as Terry (voice)

Alice Braga as Jerry (voice)

Angela Bassett as Dorothea

Pete Docter

Co-Director

Kemp Powers

Writer (story and screenplay by)

Cinematographer.

Matt Aspbury
Ian Megibben
Kevin Nolting

Composer (jazz compositions and arrangements by)

Jon Batiste
Trent Reznor
Atticus Ross

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Review: Pixar’s ‘Soul’ joins mid-life crisis, jazz fantasia

This image released by Disney-Pixar shows the character Joe Gardner, voiced by Jamie Foxx, in a scene from the animated film “Soul.” (Disney Pixar via AP)

This image released by Disney-Pixar shows the character Joe Gardner, voiced by Jamie Foxx, left, and Dorothea Williams, voiced by Angela Bassett, in a scene from the animated film “Soul.” (Disney Pixar via AP)

This image released by Disney-Pixar shows the character 22, voiced by Tina Fey, left, and Joe Gardner, voiced by Jamie Foxx, in a scene from the animated film “Soul.” (Disney Pixar via AP)

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Pete Docter’s “Soul” features stairway-to-heaven visions of the afterlife, a pre-birth “before” realm where souls are glowing turquoise orbs and an in-between spiritual realm trafficked by some kind of psychedelic pirate. And yet, kind of magically, it’s about “just regular old living.”

Pixar may have started simple with talking toys, but their concepts have grown increasingly elaborate over the years, giving abstract shape to interior consciousness (“Inside Out”), brightening a peopled world of the dead (“Coco”) and conjuring a mythical suburban land with a father’s half-resurrected body (“Onward”). “Soul” is a step further, again: a grand metaphysical whatsit — a mid-life crisis movie, a New York jazz fantasia and a body-swap comedy, all in one.

Part of the fun, of late, with Pixar’s more ambitious movies is following a plate-spinning act that juggles animation whimsy, kids-movie imperatives and the meaning of life in some seemingly impossible combination that nevertheless in the end makes us cry. You can imagine a Pixar Mad Libs coming up with a movie about hamsters in space that’s really about graduating high school, or one with unicorn cousins who learn to cope with trauma.

But part of what’s refreshing about “Soul,” which debuts Friday on Disney+, is its uniqueness. It’s a deliberate and overdue new direction for Pixar. The animation giant’s 23rd film, “Soul” is its first to feature a Black protagonist. Kemp Powers, the screenwriter of the upcoming “One Night in Miami,” is also Pixar’s first African American co-director. The film is lushly set in a sun-dappled Manhattan. You will even hear, for a moment, A Tribe Called Quest playing in the background of a barbershop. For an animation world that has almost always been colored white, this borders on radical. It’s also joyous.

Joe (Jamie Foxx) is a middle-school music teacher who has long pined for his own career as a jazz pianist. On the day his big shot finally comes — a chance to sit in with the revered saxophonist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett) and her quartet — a stray step into an open manhole robs him of his dream. With his body laying comatose in a hospital, Joe’s soul lands in a netherworld — and Pixar’s animating ingenuity goes into overdrive. Faced with an escalator to The Great Beyond reminiscent of Powell and Pressburger’s magnificent “A Matter of Life and Death,” Joe runs the other way and drops into The Great Before — a soft, pastel-colored purgatory where nascent souls find their “spark” before plunging to Earth. It’s a rolling, blue-hued land of mentorship, overseen by benevolent figures elegantly outlined in Picasso-like two-dimension.

Not everything is perfect in The Great Before. Some souls struggle to find their spark. Joe, posing as a Swedish psychologist to elude capture, is assigned to mentor number 22 (Tina Fey), a problem child who’s already cycled through everyone from Mother Teresa to Muhammad Ali looking for her spark, her purpose.

It’s the elusiveness of purpose that “Soul” swirls around, tenderly examining what gives life meaning. For some, it might come as easily as the notes that pour out of Dorothea’s sax. (The jazz scenes, curtesy of Jon Batiste, are brilliantly transportive, part of the film’s rich musical life, as scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.) But even as “Soul” rhapsodizes the beauty of artistic creation, it ponders the value of life for souls of less premeditated determination. “Soul,” a celebration of those less certain of their path in life, is a kind of corollary to Pixar’s “Ratatouille,” a portrait of a very purposeful young artist.

This comes through not just in 22’s journey but Joe’s too, as he tries desperately to return to his life and realize his long-held ambition. In the end, Joe may remind some of Burt Lancaster’s Archibald “Moonlight” Graham in “Field of Dreams,” another who returns from beyond to get another swing at an unrealized dream — and in doing so only realizes how good he had it, in the first place.

But the meaning of “Soul” also comes through in the pointillist realism of Pixar. As delightful as its imagery of the afterlife is, the best stuff might be back on Earth. It would spoil things to say too much, but Joe and 22 land back in New York in a body-swap twist that includes a therapy cat. Not all of this works, in the end; “Soul” is seeking such a high plane of sublimity that it’s sometimes forcing Pixar-styled transcendence a little too much.

But the landscapes of “Soul” are full of life. City streets teem with it. This is, undoubtedly, the best the Manhattan subway has ever looked. Little joys — pepperoni pizza, lollipops, helicopter seeds spiraling to the ground — steadily accumulate. And “Soul” turns out to be not an exploration of the afterlife but a wondrous whirligig of daily life.

“Soul,” a Walt Disney Co. release, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America for thematic elements and some language. Running time: 100 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

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'Soul' Is A Jazzy, Joyful Celebration Of Life

Linda Holmes

Stephen Thompson

Aisha Harris

Glen Weldon

Pixar's Soul is the story of a jazz musician who falls down a manhole and winds up learning a lot about the afterlife, the not-quite afterlife and what it means to be human. Pixar hide caption

Pixar's Soul is the story of a jazz musician who falls down a manhole and winds up learning a lot about the afterlife, the not-quite afterlife and what it means to be human.

In Disney and Pixar's Soul , a jazz musician voiced by Jamie Foxx falls down a manhole and finds himself teetering between life and the afterlife. He winds up on a New York adventure with a wandering soul, voiced by Tina Fey, who needs help getting ready to be reborn on Earth.

The audio was produced by Will Jarvis and edited by Jessica Reedy.

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‘Bless These Books’: How Karen Kingsbury Is Extending the Reach of Christian Fiction

She’s sold more than 25 million copies, but isn’t slowing down. An Amazon series and a film getting wide distribution mark a new phase.

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A portrait of Karen Kingsbury shows a middle-aged blonde woman in black, wearing a gold necklace and sitting in a high-backed beige chair in front of a large window. A picturesque garden can be seen through the window.

By Alexis Soloski

Reporting from Nashville

In the early years of her career, the novelist Karen Kingsbury often prayed for success. “Lord,” she would say, “bless these books beyond anything I could ask or imagine. Let them be bigger than anything I could envision and let them change culture.”

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Was it right to pray for something so worldly? Kingsbury, seated at a table in the well-appointed kitchen of her home in an upscale suburb here, smiled. The question was perhaps naïve. “I feel like it’s OK,” she explained. “God knows what you’re thinking anyway, you know?”

Kingsbury, 60, has long been hailed as the queen of Christian fiction . That is perhaps a slender crown. Until fairly recently, Christian fiction was siloed from the mainstream market, sold only at specialty bookstores. Crossover authors were rare, and as with the writers of “This Present Darkness,” “The Shack” and the “Left Behind” series, almost exclusively male. Will Kingsbury join them?

“Depending on what you think of as the mainstream market, I think she already has,” Daniel Silliman, a news editor at Christianity Today, said.

The author or coauthor of nearly 100 books, she has sold more than 25 million copies , according to Simon and Schuster (Its Atria imprint has published her latest novels). Three of her books have become Hallmark movies. A fourth, “A Thousand Tomorrows,” was adapted as a series for the faith-based streaming site Great American Pure Flix .

On the flight to Nashville, my seatmate, a nurse and a practicing Catholic, clocking my reading material, confessed her love for Kingsbury. “Her books make me happy and they give me peace,” she said. My ride-share driver knew her, too. Still, she is not yet a household name.

“I’m not John Grisham,” she said. “I’m not Nicholas Sparks.”

That may change. This week, Amazon Prime Video premieres “The Baxters,” a three-season adaptation of Kingsbury’s most popular series, produced by Roma Downey and Mark Burnett’s Lightworkers Media. And on April 2, Kingsbury’s new production company will release the romantic drama “Someone Like You” into 1,500 theaters, which may markedly increase her visibility.

That day in March, Kingsbury wore a sapphire-blue coat and a matching flowered necklace, intimations of spring. Her daisy-yellow hair fell in gentle ripples and in the hours we spent together I lost count of her offers of tea, coffee, pastries, fruit, chicken in various preparations. (Later, she wouldn’t let me leave without a baggie full of apples and string cheese.)

Entwined with this maternal energy is a rigor that has allowed her to write as many as five books each year while raising six children — three biological, three adopted as boys from Haiti — with her husband, Donald Russell.

“I’m compassionate,” she said. “But I’m competitive and I’m passionate and not passive.” Still, she tends to downplay that drive, crediting God’s grace.

A few hours before I arrived, the marketing team at Amazon had called to tell her that “The Baxters” would have a billboard overlooking Sunset Boulevard. “It does feel like an answer to a prayer,” she said. “I just feel like I can almost see God smiling.” Then she offered cookies.

Kingsbury grew up mostly in the San Fernando Valley; her voice still carries that sunshine lilt. She matriculated at Cal State Northridge, pursuing a journalism degree. The Los Angeles Times hired her onto its sports desk before she graduated, even though she knew nothing about sports.

A few years later she was poached by the Los Angeles Daily News. Around that time, at the gym, she met Russell, a clean-cut trainee teacher who insisted on bringing a Bible to their dates. Kingsbury, who had never read the Bible, found Russell infuriating. She also found him cute. Eventually, she bought her own Bible and a concordance, mostly so that she could prove to him that the Bible didn’t prohibit premarital sex.

Soon, she and Russell were baptized. Then they were married. She was pregnant six months later. An agent reached out and a contract for a nonfiction book, based on one of her newspaper crime stories, followed. Kingsbury wrote that book and three more. But the work, which relied on interviews with accused killers and grieving families, wore her down. So she tried fiction, taking 10 days off to write “Where Yesterday Lives,” inspired by her childhood.

Her publisher, Dell, didn’t want it. Other mainstream publishers passed, too. Kingsbury didn’t know much about Christian fiction. “I thought it sounded cheesy,” she said. But when a friend gave her a copy of Francine Rivers’s 1991 book “Redeeming Love,” a classic of Christian romance, Kingsbury intuited that her books might find welcome there. She was correct—“Where Yesterday Lives” was published by Multnomah, a small Christian imprint, in 1998. Still, she resisted that label, exchanging “Christian fiction” for “inspirational fiction,” then trademarking her own term, “life-changing fiction.”

Kingsbury writes quickly. That 10 days per book? It’s an average, not an outlier. (She once wrote a book in four days; she doesn’t recommend it.) Each begins with an idea, usually drawn from her own life. “I go through a day looking for miracles, looking for moments, looking for people,” she said. She spends about a week researching and another week outlining. Then she writes 10,000 words per day, typically in six hours, faster than most of us can type.

Her son Tyler Russell, who had dropped by for Scrabble and a chat, recalled that while watching his mother write was a feature of his childhood, she always put her family first. “It was never like, ‘Leave me alone. I’m writing,’” he said. “It was like, ‘I’ll sit with you, we’ll watch ‘American Idol’ and write together.’”

Most of Kingsbury’s books are romances, but they are romantic dramas, not romantic comedies. The characters experience terrible things — abuse, addiction, illness, accident. Yet each book ultimately affirms faith and family. Her father, Kingsbury said, coined a term for her genre: “hope operas.”

“It’s not necessarily a romantic happily ever after,” Kaitlin Olson, Kingsbury’s editor at Atria, said. “But these stories end with people coming to terms with themselves and their faith and moving forward.”

Kingsbury’s use of real-life problems distinguishes her from her contemporaries. “She was really early to a broader trend we see now of tackling less sweet topics,” Silliman said. “Not exactly gritty, but more realistic.”

The characters in her novels do reflect a particular reality: They are nearly always Christians, practicing or lapsed, and seemingly all straight. As the mother of three Black children, she does employ some racial diversity.

But she believes that introducing other diversity would feel too forced. “In terms of L.G.B.T.Q. or trans, any of those communities, I’m so removed from that in my day to day, it wouldn’t feel authentic,” she said. “It would just be agenda-ized.”

She is similarly cautious about sensitive issues. “Someone Like You,” for example, deals with in vitro fertilization and embryo adoption, but neatly skirts any political debate.

“I want to be authentic to the issues today, but not so much that it takes you into controversy,” she said.

Still, Kingsbury does have an agenda, or perhaps several agendas. She wants to tell a good story. She wants each book to be better than the last. (“I’m competitive with myself,” she said.) And while she believes that secular readers can enjoy her books, each is an invitation to faith.

“I would hope, when people finish a book, that coming in through the door of the heart — not like a hammer, but like a whisper — is the fact that maybe there’s something more,” she said.

In her first decades in fiction, she passed through many imprints, some owned by major publishing houses, some independent, always pursuing better marketing, better publicity, more ambitious print runs. “During those years, my least favorite place to go was a bookstore,” she said.

Because often the bookstores wouldn’t have her books at all.

That began to change, slowly, with the Baxter novels, which were initially co-written with the relationship expert Gary Smalley. The story of the Baxters begins with “Redemption” (2002), in which Kari Jacobs, née Baxter, the second eldest of five children, discovers that her husband is having an affair with one of his students. Some in her family urge her to divorce him. But Kari, who believes that marriage is a commitment, trusts in God instead.

Those books and the ones that followed increased Kingsbury’s renown and market share. Women began to show up to her readings in homemade “Baxter Babes” T-shirts. Signing lines lasted hours.

Downey, an actress (“Touched by an Angel”) and an advocate for faith-based work, was given “Redemption” years ago. She read it. Then she read all the other books in the series. Downey’s company, Lightworkers, a division of MGM, shot three seasons, in 2017 and 2018. The series languished, seeking a streamer, before finally finding its way to Amazon, which had acquired MGM in 2022, as part of a growing slate of faith-based programming.

The years that the series sat on a virtual shelf pushed Kingsbury to found her own production company, giving her more control over subsequent adaptations. She chose “Someone Like You” as her inaugural project because, as she finished it, she said she heard God say, “This is going to be your first movie.”

Her son and frequent co-writer, Tyler, was recruited to direct. Another son acts in the movie, a third was a production assistant. Each day began with devotion.

Kingsbury would like to make more movies. She is competitive about film, too. And she plans to publish more books, the next three via Forefront, a hybrid of traditional and independent publishing that she will believes will offer more flexibility.

At the moment, as far as her career is concerned, she has little left to pray for.

“There were times in my life when this was just a dream, and then there were times that in the last few years where I could see it coming,” she said. “But now it’s here and I’m ready.”

Read by Alexis Soloski

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro .

Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media. More about Alexis Soloski

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Zone of Interest’ on Max, an Unblinking Stare at the Banality of Evil

Where to stream:.

The Zone of Interest
Jonathan Glazer

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Over 400 jewish hollywood entertainers sign letter denouncing ‘zone of interest’ director jonathan glazer’s oscars speech, ‘the zone of interest’ director jonathan glazer calls out israel’s “occupation” of palestine in rousing oscars speech, new movies on streaming: ‘the zone of interest,’ ‘mean girls,’ + more.

Jonathan Glazer doesn’t make feature films very often, but when he does, we get an unforgettable work like The Zone of Interest ( now streaming on Max , in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video ). The acclaimed director of Sexy Beast , Birth and Under the Skin spent years researching and preparing to make this banality-of-evil story about Rudolf Hoss, the Nazi commandant who was not only in charge of the Auschwitz concentration camp, but also lived immediately next door to it. Seeking to remove as much of the “artifice of filmmaking” as possible, Glazer set up multiple static cameras inside a detailed replica of Hoss’ home – built very close to the real thing, which still stands – and let his cast simply “exist” in the set, the Hoss family going about its suburban routine while the sounds of genocide creep over a fence and into their idyllic garden. The film is up for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Director, and stands, like so many Holocaust films before it, as one those movies you’ll appreciate on many levels, and be glad that you’ve seen, but probably will never want to see again.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Location, location, location. Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Huller, Oscar nominee for Anatomy of a Fall ) Hoss don’t live in an extravagant home, but it’s still beautiful. Their daughters’ room is cozy and bright, Rudolf’s office is stately and the dining room is grand. The piece de resistance, though, is the garden, which is Hedwig’s pride – it stretches across a few parcels, and includes a pool for the children to play in, a broad diversity of flowering plants (including towering rows of sunflowers) and a sprawling greenhouse. We first meet the Hoss family as they look excessively pale in the sunlight along the bank of a lake. It’s a gorgeous day. They’ve taken their two sons, two daughters and baby for a swim and picnic. By the time they get home, the crickets are chirping in the twilight, the soothing warble blending in with the not-quite-distant sounds of gunshots, screaming, diesel engines and other sounds of the industry of systematic genocide.

It’s Rudolf’s birthday. The children are thrilled to gift him a three-person kayak, so new, the paint’s still fresh. He puts the baby in it and laughs that she’ll have a green bottom. All the officers from the Auschwitz camp gather outside Rudolf’s back door to wish him a happy birthday; higher-ups will meet inside his home office later to go over the blueprints for their new highly efficient mass-cremation system. When he has a rare day off, he takes two of the kids to the nearby Soln for a spin in the kayak. As they swim and he wades into the river with his fishing rod, he steps on something. It’s a human jawbone. He dashes from the water and rushes the children home, where the nanny and housekeeper scrub them in the bathtub, cleaning off any remnants of ash. At nighttime, Rudolf makes the rounds, turning off lights and locking doors. In one bedroom, he and Hedwig giggle and laugh quietly in their twin-sized beds, separated by a nightstand; in another, their elder son lays in bed with a flashlight, sifting through a box of gold teeth.

Hedwig’s mother arrives for a visit, her first at the Auschwitz house. Hedwig gives her a guided tour of the garden – a “paradise garden,” her mother labels it – and they sit near a lovely pergola, not hearing, or pretending not to hear, the grinding sounds of the industry of death churning mere yards away, on the other side of a tall privacy fence topped with barbed wire like Christ’s crown of thorns. They host a party and we get a shot of the children splashing in the pool as we see plumes of smoke progressing across the horizon from a train arriving at the camp; from the opposite angle, the brick buildings that house gas chambers and furnaces loom ominously. As they sit poolside, Rudolf tells Hedwig that he’s been so successful at overseeing Auschwitz, he’s been promoted from commandant to deputy inspector. They’ll have to relocate to Oranienburg in Germany. Hedwig is incensed. Have you seen her garden? Have you seen how happy the children are? This is their dream, she argues, and it’s even better than they ever thought it’d be. Why would anyone ever want to leave this?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: File The Zone of Interest next to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon among modern cinema’s most miserably effective examinations of the worst of humanity.

Performance Worth Watching: Between this and Anatomy of a Fall , 2023 marked an extraordinary year for Huller. Both films gave her a platform to explore compellingly thorny moral gray areas; in The Zone of Interest , her characterization is all about fascinatingly superhuman feats of compartmentalization.

Memorable Dialogue: Rudolf takes his son for a horseback ride through the woods. As the sounds of the Auschwitz camp creep into the scene, Rudolf points something out to the boy: “Do you hear that? It’s a bittern. A Eurasian gray heron.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The Zone of Interests opens with a black screen and an ambient-music overture, functioning as a palate cleanser for what we’re about to see: A family going about its daily business. Boys play with toy soldiers, the nanny sits with her head in her hands as the baby wails in the wee hours, women chat over tea, a father reads his daughters a bedtime story. But one of the boys wears the uniform of the Hitler Youth. The sound of furnaces belching smoke and flame have awakened the child. The women casually discuss acquiring a dress from a “Jewess.” The story is Hansel and Gretel , and we specifically hear the part about the children pushing the witch into the oven.

Sometimes, we have to block out troublesome thoughts just to get through the workday and put dinner on the table and get the kids to bed. But the Hoss family is a different story. The children are collateral damage, while the adults function on a different level, especially Hedwig. While her husband ventures to the other side of the fence daily, she doesn’t, and prompts us to wonder whether complicity or indifference is worse. Most people get used to the best and worst of new surroundings; having acclimated to living in boiling water, Rudolf and Hedwig have become truly inhuman. Cue a crushingly prosaic scene: Rudolf makes a phone call, dictating a memo to camp workers. He wants them to please be conscious of not destroying the lilac bushes while picking flowers. We recognize the crass irony of the moment. Does he?

Glazer never shows us what happens on the other side of the fence. He doesn’t have to – we’ve seen it in Schindler’s List , Life is Beautiful , Son of Saul and others. In this film, though, the idea that what’s in our imagination is more terrifying than what we witness firsthand holds true as ever. The cinematography functions as a harsh staredown, as if the camera is trying to will its subjects to recognize reality, to self-reflect. The director tells parallel stories: The one we see, a quasi-observational family drama, austere and unblinking. And the one we hear, a horror story and condemnation of these characters (for this reason, the film is nominated for a best sound Oscar). These narratives intersect so frequently in our minds, because we’re not evil, and we try to will it to happen to Hedwig and Rudolf, perhaps because we value redemption stories, even when there are none.

Not all of the film is chillingly astringent. Glazer deviates from the static camera/natural light formality in a few scenes depicting Polish Jews whose faces go largely unseen: A girl, shot with reverse-negative photography, hides apples for starving prisoners; a lament played on a piano is subject to subtitles, instrumental music translated into words; a late-film sequence flash-forwards to present-day Auschwitz. History passes judgment. Not all is hopeless, and not all is forgotten.

Our Call: The Zone of Interest is an exceptional film, and a difficult one to endure. The most vital stories are so often that way. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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‘Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy’ Review: A Scary Look at the Potential Soldiers of a Second Trump Reign

The followers of Christian Nationalism want a theocracy. Stephen Ujlaki and Chris Jones's chilling film suggests that another Trump presidency could help them get it.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

‘Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy’ Review: A Scary Look at the Potential Soldiers of a Second Trump Reign 3 days ago
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In 2017, Trump, once he took the reins of power, was constrained — by the other branches of government, and by the rule of law. He didn’t become the explicitly, committedly anti-democratic figure he is now until the 2020 election, when his declaration that he was actually the winner, and that Joe Biden had stolen the election, became the new cornerstone of his ideology. In the intervening period, Trump has been setting himself up to rule the United States as an authoritarian leader, and that meshes perfectly with the goals of Christian Nationalism, a movement that’s built around the dream of transforming America into a theocracy: a Christian nation ruled by a higher power than the Constitution — that is, by the will of God, as interpreted by his white Christian followers.

The alliance between Trump and Christian Nationalism is a profound one. Progressives tend to be focused, to the point of obsession, on the hypocrisy of the alliance — the idea that men and women who are supposedly devoted to the teachings of Jesus Christ could rally behind a sinner and law-breaker like Trump, who seems the incarnation of everything they should be against. The documentary fills in their longstanding justification: that Trump is seen as a modern-day version of King Cyrus, a pagan who God used as a tool to help the people. According to this mode of opportunistic logic, Trump doesn’t need to be a pious Christian; his very recklessness makes him part of a grander design. The Christian Nationalists view Trump much as his disgruntled base of working-class nihilist supporters have always viewed him — as a kind of holy wrecking ball.

But, of course, that’s just the rationalization. “Bad Faith” captures the intricacy with which Trump, like certain Republicans before him, has struck a deal with the Christian Right that benefits both parties. In exchange for their support in 2016, he agreed to back a slate of judicial appointees to their liking, and to come over to their side on abortion. Trump’s victory in 2016, like Reagan’s in 1980, was sealed by the support of the Christian Right. But what he’s promising them this time is the very destruction of the American system that they have long sought.

The most chilling aspect of “Bad Faith” is that, in tracing the roots of the Christian Right, the movie colors in how the dream of theocracy has been the movement’s underlying motivation from almost the start. In 1980, when the so-called Moral Majority came into existence, its leader, Jerry Falwell, got all the attention. (A corrupt quirk of the movement is that as televangelists like Falwell, Pat Robertson, and, later on, Joel Osteen became rich and famous, their wealth was presented as evidence that God had chosen them to lead.) But Falwell, despite the headlines he grabbed, wasn’t the visionary organizer of the Moral Majority.

That was Paul Weyrich, the owlish conservative religious activist who founded the hugely influential Council for National Policy, which spearheaded the structural fusion of Christianity and right-wing politics. He’s the one who went to Falwell and Robertson and collated their lists of supporters into a Christian political machine that could become larger than the sum of its parts. The machine encompassed a network of 72,000 preachers, it employed sophisticated methods of micro-targeting, and its impetus was to transform Evangelical Christianity into a movement that was fundamentally political. The G.O.P. became “God’s own party,” and the election of Reagan was the Evangelicals’ first victory. We see a clip of Reagan saying how he plans to “make America great again,” which is the tip of the iceberg of how much the Trump playbook got from him.

Randall Balmer, the Ivy League historian of American religion who wrote the book “Bad Faith,” is interviewed in the documentary, and he makes a fascinating point: that there’s a mythology that the Christian Right was first galvanized, in 1973, by Roe v. Wade — but that, in fact, that’s not true. Jerry Falwell didn’t deliver his first anti-abortion sermon until 1978. According to Balmer, the moment that galvanized the Christian Right was the 1971 lower-court ruling on school desegregation that held that any institution that engages in racial discrimination or segregation is not, by definition, a charitable institution, and therefore has no claim to tax-exempt status.

This had an incendiary effect. Churches like Jerry Falwell’s were not integrated and didn’t want to be; yet they also wanted their tax-exempt status. It was this law that touched off the anti-government underpinnings of the Christian Right, much as the sieges of Ruby Ridge and Waco became the seeds of the alt-right. And it sealed the notion that Christian Nationalism and White Nationalism were joined at the hip, a union that went back to the historical fusion of the two in the Ku Klux Klan’s brand of Christian terrorism.

“Bad Faith” makes a powerful case that Christian Nationalism is built on a lie: the shibboleth that America was originally established as a “Christian nation.” It’s true to say that the Founders drew on the moral traditions of Judeo-Christian culture. Yet the freedom of religion in the First Amendment was put there precisely as a guard against religious tyranny. It was, at the time, a radical idea: that the people would determine how — and what God — they wanted to worship. In truth, Christian Nationalism undermines not only the freedoms enshrined by the Constitution but the very concept of free will that’s at the heart of Christian theology. You can’t choose to be a follower of Christ if that belief is imposed on you.

Reviewed online, April 2, 2024. Running time: 88 MIN.

Production: A Heretical Reason Productions, Panarea production. Producers: Stephen Ujlaki, Chris Jones. Executive producers: Peter D. Graves, John Ptak, Mike Steed, Todd Stiefel.
Crew: Directors: Stephen Ujlaki, Chris Jones. Screenplay: Stephen Ujlaki, Chris Jones, Alec Baer. Camera: Bill Yates, Pilar Timpane, Trevor May. Editor: Alec Baer, Chris Jones. Music: Lili Haydn, Jeremy Grody.
With: Peter Coyote, Elizabeth Neumann, Randall Balmer, Ken Peters, Eboo Patel, Katherine Stewart, Samuel Perry, Russell Moore, Rev. William Barber II, Linda Gordon, Jim Wallis, Lisa Sharon Harper, Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove, Anne Nelson, Brent Allpress, John Marty.

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Screen Rant

The first omen review: horror prequel criticizes church corruption in effective franchise entry.

The First Omen contains the scary elements from the classics and creative upgrades, resulting in a hit for the horror genre and The Omen franchise.

The First Omen goes beyond surface-level storytelling, featuring great visual storytelling.
Nell Tiger Free delivers a wonderful leading performance in The First Omen .
The film explores themes of church corruption and womanhood, adding layers to classic horror tactics.

Richard Donner’s The Omen took the world by storm when it first premiered in 1976. It told the story of Damien Thorn, a child believed to be the spawn of Satan who would grow up to be the Antichrist. Since then, several sequels and even a 2006 remake have followed, but they never really amounted to the greatness of the first movie. But that all changed with The First Omen , a prequel to the original.

The First Omen is a horror film from director Arkasha Stevenson that acts as a prequel to the 1976 film The Omen. The film follows a young woman who goes to Rome to become a nun but begins to question her faith after encountering a terrifying darkness that aims to spawn an evil incarnate.

The First Omen goes beyond surface-level storytelling.
Nell Tiger Free gives a wonderful leading performance.
Arkasha Stevenson's feature debut comes with great visual storytelling.
The editing is a bit jarring at times.

Directed by first-time feature director Arkasha Stevenson, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Keith Thomas and Tim Smith, The First Omen contains the scary elements from the classics and creative upgrades, resulting in a hit for the horror genre and The Omen franchise .

The First Omen Opens With Proper Atmosphere-Building

It sets the tone for the rest of the film and its events.

The First Omen , set in 1971 , starts off with a mysterious and daunting sequence that may produce equal amounts of anxiety and confusion. It’s the perfect beginning to a horror film of this kind, as we’re already familiar with the basics. Yet the mystery surrounding the conversation between Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson) and Father Harris (Charles Dance) is enough to set up the atmosphere. The screenwriters do well by keeping their conversation as vague as possible. And it’s the first reason viewers will focus on the screen and stay glued to their seats.

Where To Watch The First Omen: Showtimes & Streaming Status

Soon after, a young American woman named Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) arrives in Rome, ready to dedicate her life to God by servicing the youth at the Vizzerdeli Orphanage before her vows. In classic horror movie style, most things appear to be normal until she meets Carlita Skianna (Nicole Sorace), an outcast orphan who has been deemed bad by the nuns. Troubling visions and circumstances begin to occur, which sends Margaret on a hunt to uncover the truth. Her investigation unravels a disturbing truth that enables Stevenson to put on a tremendous horror showcase.

The First Omen

The first omen delivers quality themes & entertainment, stevenson's feature debut is a strong one.

The best part about Stevenson’s film is how her directing guides us on a trippy journey that is equally horrifying and emotionally gripping. Even the classic jump scares come with added layers of terror that will leave a lasting picture in your mind. But underneath these standard strategies taken to amplify the mood is a genuinely good story with a theme of church corruption at the center of it all. The script intently focuses on what many people hate about religion: How people use inhumane and violent methods in God’s name even though it goes against His teachings.

Another exceptional theme explored in The First Omen is womanhood, as it relates to body autonomy and purpose. With such a prevalent topic in today’s world, the film could have swayed towards either the offensive or even a half-baked examination. But the team behind this horror film understands their central female lead and gives us a fine character journey worth every second. To that end, Free gives a performance that has already become one of my favorites in the genre. She is a young actress we should all get used to seeing on the big screen.

The team behind this horror film understands their central female lead and gives us a fine character journey worth every second.

Often defying its own genre to borrow from the likes of thriller films, The First Omen is a prequel done right. It contains classic jump scares we all love, with an intensely emotional and frightening story to back it up. With an incredible dissection of church corruption related to evil acts in God’s name, Stevenson’s feature debut boldly uses Margaret to facilitate important dialogue when it comes to religion and understanding one's purpose. And thanks to a great central performance from Free, I wouldn’t be surprised if The First Omen became a favorite of the entire franchise.

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Soul (2020)
Movie Review: 'Soul'
Movie Reviews
"Soul" (2020)- Movie Review
Soul
Soul, the movie— A thorough analysis of Music, Spirituality, Purpose

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top 8 Christian movies
Soul (2020) Movie Quick Recap

COMMENTS

Soul (2020)
"Soul" leads us towards non-Christian beliefs and Eastern religions. If we really hold on to the teachings of the Bible, let the Bible guide us how to live and to understand spiritual things. Let us keep on digging the truth of God, while sluggards sleep. So, beware. "Soul" movie is saturated with non-Christian beliefs.
'Soul' and the Purpose-Driven Generation
Disney Pixar's Soul offers a surprisingly heady philosophical message to a distressed generation that is trying to find purpose through meaningful work. The film's main insight is something ...
Soul
Certainly, Christian families will want to be aware of the movie's spiritual elements before deciding to watch; and you should be prepared to talk about the story's provocative ideas afterward. As noted, the story's spiritual conceits here have little connection to traditional Christian understandings of these important questions.
Disney Pixar Soul Christian Movie Review
This Disney Pixar Soul Christian Movie Review is designed to give you the information you need before viewing the movie. Pixar Animation Studios' Soul explores What makes you…YOU. The main character, Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) is a jazz musician, but is currently a middle-school band teacher until he can get his big break. He wants to be a ...
Movie Review: 'Soul'
Movie Review: 'Soul'. NEW YORK (CNS) — As the director of such films as "Up" (2009) and 2015's "Inside Out," Pete Docter has taken cartoons to the heights of artistry, proving that an animated feature can be touching, emotionally rich and memorable. And that's to say nothing of his involvement in the four "Toy Story" movies.
Soul
Daniel shares his thoughts on Pixar's latest film, "Soul". Read our written analysis of the film here: https://thecollision.org/2020/12/29/the-worldview-of-s...
Soul
Film Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat. Soul is a 2020 computer-animated fantasy/comedy/drama film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. This is a spiritually rich film that immerses us in what Joseph Campbell once called "the soul's high adventure." Its protagonist is a talented jazz pianist whose ...
Father James Martin talks with the creator of Pixar's 'Soul' about
By creating "Soul," Mr. Docter made a parable of his own, Father Martin suggested. They agreed about the power of storytelling to facilitate better communication and deeper connections.
"Soul" Review: The Reflection We Need In 2020
Pixar has a way with giving us films that speak to children, the inner child in adults, and adults. Their latest film, "Soul", hits all three. While it has its moments of bloat and overly-complex narrative, there's no doubt that it will leave you thinking about your life and the journey we all walk in finding our purpose. Jamie Foxx ...
Movie Review: Soul (2020)
Rather, it allows the artistry to express the political progression by making Soul partially a film about the black community. This includes the setting, the supporting characters, an insightful scene that takes place in a barber's, and of course the use of jazz. The film has been criticized for "whitewashing" blackness, as the soul ...
SOUL
SOUL is a strange combination of very mild Christian belief that you die once combined with much stronger New Age beliefs heavily influenced by Hinduism with a discussion of chakras, meditation n a Hindu sense, gurus, and a stranger representation of seemingly dual-natured angels combining feminism and masculine traits all given the same name as well as the spiritual realm being an afterlife ...
Movie Review: Soul
Soul is another artful film with an uplifting message and theme, but one that fails to point to the source of goodness and life. We are works of art being formed by God's hands. As Romans 12 reveals, the big moments and mundane are gifts we offer to our Creator, and he brings meaning and purpose to them all as he leads, prepares and enables us.
A Christian defense and discussion of Pixar's Soul
Following up on "My Friend Watches Soul for the first time," I wanted to take a look at this movie from a Christian lens while also talking about Christian r...
Disney Pixar's SOUL Movie Review
Disney Pixar's SOUL Movie Review. So, I watched Disney's Pixar movie 'SOUL' starring Jamie Foxx and Tina Fey on Disney+ with my three little children for a family movie night on 12/28. As expected, Disney intentionally filled the movie with magical/spirit-world foolishness. Christian parents please be beware of Disney movies and shows.
'Soul': Movie Review
SOUL has a very confusing plot line that's filled with New Age and Hindu content and sadly isn't as well done as Pixar's movie INSIDE OUT. The movie opens with a black music teacher, Joe, trying to teach his high school class about jazz. (It should be noted that this reviewer loves jazz, and the movie's jazz references are very good.)
'Soul' Is the Anti-Disney Disney Movie
A not-yet-born soul named 22 (Tina Fey)—who is avoiding an embodied life on Earth—joins Joe in this story. Though each of them begins from different starting points—Joe not wanting to die and 22 not wanting to live—both discover that "all this living is worth dying for.". Death Is Unavoidable. Life Is Precious.
'Soul' Review: From the Minds Behind 'Inside Out ...
Critics Pick 'Soul' Review: From the Minds Behind 'Inside Out' Comes an Even Deeper Look at What Makes People Tick Pixar gives audiences a fresh way to think about the dimension that ...
Soul movie review & film summary (2020)
Soul. Matt Zoller Seitz December 25, 2020. Tweet. Now streaming on: Powered by JustWatch. Pixar's "Soul" is about a jazz pianist who has a near-death experience and gets stuck in the afterlife, contemplating his choices and regretting the existence that he mostly took for granted. Pixar veteran Pete Docter is the credited co-director, alongside ...
Review: Pixar's 'Soul' joins mid-life crisis, jazz fantasia
The animation giant's 23rd film, "Soul" is its first to feature a Black protagonist. Kemp Powers, the screenwriter of the upcoming "One Night in Miami," is also Pixar's first African American co-director. The film is lushly set in a sun-dappled Manhattan. You will even hear, for a moment, A Tribe Called Quest playing in the ...
'Soul' Review: A Jazzy, Joyful Celebration Of Life
Pixar's Soul is the story of a jazz musician who falls down a manhole and winds up learning a lot about the afterlife, the not-quite afterlife and what it means to be human. Pixar. In Disney and ...
'Soul' review: Pixar's life-after-death movie rivals its ...
Pixar's 'Soul.'. Ultimately, Joe and 22 do find their way to Earth, but not in the way (or form) he expected, leading to a madcap series of encounters as he seeks to achieve what he sees as his ...
Soul Surfer: Christian Movie Review < Entertainment
Christian movie viewers will be delighted with her answer. In the End . Grading its overall appeal, Soul Surfer comes out strong, offering us one of the best faith-friendly movies since The Blind Side. It's quality entertainment that will have a soul-searching effect on movie lovers. More movie reviews from a Christian perspective on CBN.com
Karen Kingsbury, the Queen of Christian Fiction, is Aiming Bigger
Her son and frequent co-writer, Tyler, was recruited to direct. Another son acts in the movie, a third was a production assistant. Each day began with devotion. Kingsbury would like to make more ...
Someone Like You (2024)
Someone Like You: Directed by Tyler Russell. With Sarah Fisher, Jake Allyn, Lynn Collins, Robyn Lively. Based on the novel by #1 NYTimes bestselling author Karen Kingsbury, "Someone Like You" is an achingly beautiful love story. After the tragic loss of his best friend, a grieving young architect launches a search for her secret twin sister.
'The Zone of Interest' HBO Max Movie Review: Stream It Or Skip It?
Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Huller, Oscar nominee for Anatomy of a Fall) Hoss don't live in an extravagant home, but it's still beautiful. Their daughters' room is cozy and ...
'Bad Faith' Review: The Potential Soldiers of A Second Trump Reign
'Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism's Unholy War on Democracy' Review: A Scary Look at the Potential Soldiers of a Second Trump Reign Reviewed online, April 2, 2024. Running time: 88 MIN.
'Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism's War on Democracy' Review: A Scary
"Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism's War on Democracy" is the scariest film I've seen in a long time. It's a documentary that explores the rise of Christian Nationalism, and much of what it shows you, about the mutation of the Christian Right into a movement that has openly abandoned any loyalty to democracy, has been covered in the mass media in recent years.
The First Omen Review: Horror Prequel Criticizes Church Corruption In
The First Omen, set in 1971, starts off with a mysterious and daunting sequence that may produce equal amounts of anxiety and confusion.It's the perfect beginning to a horror film of this kind, as we're already familiar with the basics. Yet the mystery surrounding the conversation between Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson) and Father Harris (Charles Dance) is enough to set up the atmosphere.

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