He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.
Aside from the unsurprising success of The Passion of the Christ and The Chosen this Easter, an unusual faith-based film seems to have found a spot for itself on the re-watch lists of religious audiences. The movie was released a decade ago and was headlined by Joseph Fiennes and Tom Felton. It was directed by Kevin Reynolds, best known for his many collaborations with star Kevin Costner — the two worked together on the ill-fated Waterworld, the limited series Hatfields & McCoys, and the box-office hit Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The 2016 movie was quietly successful at the box office and has steadily expanded its reach in the last decade.
The movie was positioned as a genre spin on a familiar story. It revolves around a Roman soldier who is tasked with locating Jesus’ body after the resurrection. Fiennes played the Roman soldier leading the search for Jesus’ body, while Felton — best known for playing Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies — starred as the soldier’s companion. The role of Jesus was played by Cliff Curtis, while Peter Firth played Pontius Pilate. The movie received mixed reviews upon release and is now sitting at a 53% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. This happens to be slightly higher than the 50% that The Passion of the Christ seems to have settled at.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
We’re talking, of course, about Risen. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus for the movie reads, “Risen benefits from a lighter tone than many faith-based productions, as well as a unique take on the Greatest Story Ever Told and a terrific turn from star Joseph Fiennes.” Like Mel Gibson’s blockbuster, Risen also has a higher audience score on the aggregator; it’s currently perched at 70% with over 10,000 ratings. This is one of the biggest reasons for its continued success at home. According to FlixPatrol, Risen was among the most-watched movies on the global HBO Max chart on Easter, when the leaderboard was topped by 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which, coincidentally, stars Fiennes’ brother, Ralph.
Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
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Kevin Reynolds, Paul Aiello
Mickey Liddell, Patrick Aiello, Pete Shilaimon