Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus Reviews
Top Critic
The soundtrack, which includes Lee Sexton, The Handsome Family and others, is full of haunting Southern sounds; the camera work is inventive; and the interviews give you an off-center sense of place that equals at least one aspect of the South.
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| Original Score: B
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus is one of those movie-long non sequiturs where, though one thought does not logically follow another, we know what is meant.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A portrait of rural America as beautiful as it is bizarre.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Douglas has crafted a beautifully shot and edited film that treats its subjects fairly.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Ultimately, pic feels very much like a romanticized, outsider's view of the South that willfully seeks out the culture's strangest, most weirdo aspects for other outsiders' gleeful delectation.
While the camera does capture some terrific images of a part of the country that seems to have been stopped in time some decades ago, too often the condescending tone and pretentiousness undercut the attempts at sociological exploration.
Gradually, though, White pushes the film toward significance by encouraging a deeper examination of two primary preoccupations of the region: sin and penance.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Jim White, the songwriter and hero of alt-country music, conducts a highly selective back-roads tour of the rural Deep South in this richly lyrical documentary.
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| Original Score: 3/5
The atmosphere that Andrew Douglas' documentary captures so poetically is checkered with rocking Pentecostal churches and abandoned school buses, but you won't encounter any of the smirking condescension.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A sort of BBC Hee Haw, meant to reassure Brits and New Yorkers that the South is indeed a land of pistol-toting, Jesus-praising gap-toothed freaks.
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Andrew Douglas's vivid documentary drinks it in, casting aside road movie linearity in favor of a trailer park surrealism cobbled from drifting traveling shots and abstracted images.
