Anytime you pick something based on two criteria, most of the time those that are strongest on one criteria will be weakest on the second. For instance in basketball you are selecting on great shooting and great athleticism. This is why the winners of the three point contest tend to be bad at dunking and the winners of the dunk contest are bad at shooting threes. Players who are great at both are rare as hens teeth.
Same thing in movies, Christian movie scripts are chosen on the basis of piety and entertainment. The more pious the script the worse it is at entertaining. If you compare these movies with ones made just for entertainment purposes then they will suffer in comparison. Movies like “The Passion of the Christ” are rare.
But the movie was based on a book - which was widely considered “the most influential Christian book of the 19th century”.
It was the first work of fiction blessed by the Pope! 
Can you get any more Christian than that?
As for reasonably recent (as within the last 50 years!) - and good - Christian movies, I’d nominate The Last Temptation of Christ and Jesus of Montreal. Neither were made to highlight evangelism, though.
To Save A Life - was pretty good in that the target market I watched it with - teenagers - seemed to like it. I personally didn’t mind it more than any other teenage-inspirational movie
I would also add that in these movies the token atheist isn’t actually an atheist. They’re angry at God for something and just need a push in the right direction to repent.
Same for The Call, if you’re familiar with them.
Given that the OP and others in this thread have identified themselves as Christian, let’s avoid the broad brush Christianity/Christians insults.
No warning issued, but will be if this turns into a Christians/Christianity bashing thread.
I’m remembering now those Davey And Goliath shorts they used to show on TV when I was a kid.
Define Christian movie as a movie about Christians whose faith is very significant to the movie, and there are lots of contenders–what about Selma, fer instance?
The problem with “Christian movies” defined as movies by Christian production studios for Christian audiences is that they’re trying less to be good art and more to be propaganda for the faithful. They’re not aimed at folks who are very concerned about aesthetics; of course they suck.
But I think it’s worth defining the term more broadly.
Let’s say, the first work regarded by the Pope as fictional.
The claymation ones? They still show them on one of the religious channels - TBN, I think.
Those were a Lutheran church production and still get used in Sunday School. In retrospect they had a nice mix of faith and political liberalism, so I get that they might still be useful.
I think the biggest issue is the lack of quality control. There’s a large segment of the population who take a one-dimensional Boolean approach to all value judgements. Is it Christian? If yes, then it’s good, and if no, then it’s bad (this can also lead to equating all “good” things with each other, and equating all “bad” things with each other, like thinking that abortion is the same thing as homosexuality because they’re both “bad”, but that’s more a matter for GD). If you’re making a movie (or song, or book, or whatever) for this crowd, the actual quality of the work is completely irrelevant, so it ends up being about as bad as you’d expect from someone who didn’t care about quality.
When The Last Temptation of Christ came out, I was a member of a fundamentalist Christian church. The movie was very poorly received by most of the people I knew in that sphere, because it strays from the depiction of Jesus in the Gospels, and, in particular, because it depicts Jesus having been married to Mary Magdalene (and there’s a sex scene between the two of them).
There were a number of vehement protests against the film when it came out, and it’s apparently still banned in several countries. In short, it’s a movie about Jesus, but most of the audience for the “Christian movies” that the OP describes would likely never willingly watch it.
My mother-in-law was an administrator for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and they were the ones who still had ownership / administration of Davey and Goliath, at least as of a few years ago.
There is a odd Adult Swim show that started as a loose kind of parody called Moral Orel, in the later episodes it abandons comedy and becomes a really chilling study in an abusive horrible family and study of the religious hypocrites in a small town. All claymation.
If you liked Davey and Goliath it is interesting.
Seeing the references to Davey and Goliath, I’m reminded of many of the church produced Sunday morning dramas, from the Lutherans, and (I forget that Catholic group-I’m wanting to say Jesuits, but, that’s not right), etc… They were really quite well produced, for TV at least, and they have had some great actors. (read: semi-big names).
One, called “Jesus BC”, or “Christ BC”, (you can Youtube it) had William Windom and Tim Matheson in it. It was fun, amusing and had a remarkably tight evangelical theme/message to it. I saw it about 35 years ago, and it has stuck in my head ever since. Thank God for Youtube/Internet/imdb/etc…
ETA: Youtube “Davey and Goliath Mountain Dew” for an amusing commericial.
handsomeharry, you’re talking about this episode:
of this TV series:
which was produced by Paulist Productions:
I can’t find that episode on Youtube, but it seems to be possible to download it from other websites.
It may not fully fit in the category, but When the Game Stands Tall was a co-production with Affirm Films (Sony’s branch that produces films such as Fireproof) and rose at least to the level of mediocrity.
There are many films made by Christians and imbued with Christianity, but not many that also seem to be for Christians. Although the recent Calvary comes close. The screenwriter (John McDonagh) and his brother (Martin) do excellent work with Christian themes (Martin wrote In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths).
I’d also recommend a podcast I recently started listening to, called More Than One Lesson, that looks at films from a Christian standpoint. They do talk about the films marketed to the Evangelical audience without ignoring the faults.
Yes indeed!
Some of the very best art to be found in America can be found in rural churches.
I plan to make a tour of the Churches of the South in the hope of examining pre Civil War art work. I’ve been led to believe that some of it is just superb.
If things pan out as I believe they will, I hope to write a book titled, "Wonderful Art Work of Pre-Civil War Southern Churches in America. I expect it will contains some beautiful artwork and hope that other people will enjoy it as much as I hope to enjoy doing the photography.