Brett McCracken
Tomatometer-approved critic
Brett McCracken is a senior editor for The Gospel Coalition, where he writes about art, culture, faith, and theology. He has also been a regular film critic for Christianity Today and has contributed to the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, CNN.com, and others. Find Brett @BrettMcCracken.
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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The Integrity of Joseph Chambers (2022) |
This film deserves a bigger audience. We need more movies like this that engage art and theology in equal measure; films that ask audiences to think carefully about something beautiful but hard—integrity—that we’d all do well to think about more. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Mar 14, 2023
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Montana Story (2021) |
Rather than relegating its traumatized characters to a boring arc of unending pain, Montana Story sets the stage for what’s ultimately more interesting: renewal, redemption, and moving on in health. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 27, 2023
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Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) |
The Way of Water is surprisingly conservative in its celebration of family and especially fatherhood. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 27, 2023
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The Worst Person in the World (2021) |
Few films have more potently exposed the empty romance of the autonomous self, “empowered” to live free of the sacrifices requisite in things like marriage, parenthood, and rootedness. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 27, 2023
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Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021) |
More than anything, it’s a film about joy: joy in family, joy in friendship, and joy in the many wonders of life we often miss. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 27, 2023
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Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (2022) |
Linklater shows how movies mirror the mind. We process and remember reality—whether our own lives or distant images of men on the moon—through imperfect filters of memory and imagination. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 27, 2023
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Devotion (2022) |
Devotion foregrounds the virtue of devoted relationships: faithfully showing up for one another and following through on duty, whether in marriage or friendship or war. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 27, 2023
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The Wonder (2022) |
The film tacitly frames faith and science as both “stories” with sincere, devoted adherents. But it leaves no doubt as to which story we should prefer. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 27, 2023
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The Whale (2022) |
If honesty to self trumps all other values and commitments, then whatever hinders authenticity is villainized. In The Whale, the church—and its privileging of God’s revealed truth over our subjective authenticity—is thus the biggest villain. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 27, 2023
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Women Talking (2022) |
Women Talking asks hard questions about Christianity without using those questions to discredit faith entirely. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 27, 2023
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Strange World (2022) |
Perhaps fittingly for its “lost in an unknown world” narrative, Strange World feels adrift in a void of meaning. When one character says, “We are definitely off the map now,” she might as well be describing the movie as a whole. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Nov 29, 2022
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Armageddon Time (2022) |
Armageddon Time isn’t a straightforward celebration of family and generational advancement in America, but neither is it an arrogant dismissal of the goods we inherit from our forebears. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Nov 18, 2022
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The Fabelmans (2022) |
The movie grapples with the tension between an artist’s free-spirited, risk-seeking individualism and the value of relational stability and fidelity. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Nov 18, 2022
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Aftersun (2022) |
Aftersun captures the poignant beauty of ephemeral joy—moments our memory can miraculously suspend in time. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Nov 18, 2022
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Tár (2022) |
In the character of Lydia Tár we have a perfect symbol of contemporary Western culture’s anemic anthropology—our utter confusion about what it means to be human. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Oct 28, 2022
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Surprised by Oxford (2022) |
Surprised by Oxford prioritizes things often neglected in faith-based entertainment: stylistic beauty, smart story, good acting, and a goal of entertaining the audience more than preaching to them. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Oct 15, 2022
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Thirteen Lives (2022) |
Their lives matter, to the point of warranting immense resources to save them (the Thai cave rescue involved 10,000 people and cost $9 million). - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Sep 03, 2022
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Infinite Storm (2022) |
The rescue is pitched as an example of coping with suffering by choosing kindness in a cruel world. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Sep 03, 2022
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Breaking (2022) |
The film challenges us to bear witness to Easley’s fate not as distant spectators but as those whose own sin (for which we are certainly individually accountable) isn’t unrelated to or disconnected from his. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Aug 26, 2022
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Nope (2022) |
Not only are the characters throughout the film guilty of the sin of gawking at and exploiting—rather than respecting—creatures and humans alike, but the film’s audience must consider their own posture. Do we find pleasure in the horrors we watch? - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Aug 26, 2022
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Elvis (2022) |
Though largely chronological, Luhrmann’s film is less about “this leads to that” storytelling as it is about iconic moments—defining phases and turning points in the artist’s life and career. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jul 09, 2022
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Top Gun: Maverick (2022) |
Maverick’s fidelity to the past goes deeper than dollar signs. This is a film where generational commitments matter and institutional continuity is valued. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jun 27, 2022
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Lightyear (2022) |
Where Toy Story celebrated childhood as childhood, even leading adult viewers to feel like kids again, Lightyear does the opposite—pushing childhood into adulthood in inappropriate ways. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jun 27, 2022
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What Is a Woman? (2022) |
The film is strongest when it isn’t poking fun at trans activists or making them squirm with gotcha questions, but rather when trans skeptics are given the chance to speak—something too few platforms are willing to do today. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jun 11, 2022
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After Yang (2021) |
The film asks more questions than it answers, which is the type of science-fiction drama I like. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted May 06, 2022
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Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) |
More or less a microcosm of your average day online—scrolling through feeds of random information, seeing context-less fragments of people’s lives, and generally feeling overwhelmed by the limitless drama unfolding at any given time, all over the world. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted May 06, 2022
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Kimi (2022) |
Anyone leery of Big Tech’s data-mining capabilities should probably avoid this film, which frighteningly plays out the implications of a world where the tech in your home (or hand) records your every movement and decision. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted May 06, 2022
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Swan Song (2021) |
Is humanity’s beauty irrevocably tied to its contingency and potential for real loss and suffering? Swan Song helps us think through these questions in a moving, life-affirming way. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted May 06, 2022
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Turning Red (2022) |
For all of its merits, the film ultimately advocates a wrongheaded central message under the guise of empowerment: embrace who you are, even your reckless vices and dangerous impulses, and dont let anyone stop you. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Mar 22, 2022
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The Batman (2022) |
So committed is this film to a reenvisioned Batman look, feel, and face that I never thought of the other films as I watched. It might be the best reboot Ive seen. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Mar 12, 2022
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Dune (2021) |
More than any movie this year, Dune gave me hope that big screen, big movies, with big ideas, have a future. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 26, 2022
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The Courier (2020) |
Celebrates a bygone era when it wasn't abnormal to sacrifice one's personal interests for the sake of a larger community or cause. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 26, 2022
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The Killing of Two Lovers (2020) |
[Displays] both the dangers of trifling with a sacred covenant, and the valor of fighting to restore it. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 26, 2022
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Pig (2021) |
A film about how we respond to tragedy and injustice, Pig is both timely and timeless. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 26, 2022
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CODA (2021) |
A tender celebration of the resilience of a family unit and the beauty of mutually sacrificial, self-giving love. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 26, 2022
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Belfast (2021) |
I love how Belfast captures the sehnsucht longing that another Northern Irish Protestant-C. S. Lewis-once described. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 26, 2022
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C'mon C'mon (2021) |
I don't think I've seen a film that captures so well the unique terror, confusion, exhaustion, and joy of 21st-century parenting. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 26, 2022
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The Matrix Resurrections (2021) |
It's an amorphous blob of a movie, full of sleepy action scenes and scatterbrained philosophical one-liners. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 18, 2022
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Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) |
For all its entertaining merits, Spider-Man: No Way Home felt to me more like a low-stakes trifle than a thrilling epic. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 18, 2022
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The Lost Daughter (2021) |
When mothers, fathers, husbands, and wives ditch commitments in search of the true self, it's a move that fails to satisfy. It's an escape but not a solution. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jan 18, 2022
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The Card Counter (2020) |
It strikes me as perhaps Schrader's most interesting engagement with theological themes. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Oct 08, 2021
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Mass (2021) |
Mass explores the messy tension between righteous rage and demands for justice, on one hand, and forgiveness and grace on the other. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Oct 08, 2021
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The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021) |
[The film] doesn't have eyes to see that while its heroine may be sweet and spunky and fearless, she is just as much a peddler of gospel distortions as her husband. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Sep 17, 2021
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Stillwater (2021) |
For a film exploring moral authority, Stillwater cedes its own-unnecessarily-by recklessly blurring fact and fiction. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Aug 21, 2021
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Nine Days (2020) |
The last two words in Nine Days are really the only ones that can make sense of the mystery of being: 'Thank you.' - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jul 30, 2021
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A Quiet Place Part II (2021) |
Having been raised by a dad who modeled self-sacrificial love and courage, Regan [and Marcus] both demonstrate these characteristics in the film. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jun 16, 2021
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Cruella (2021) |
Does Satan himself have an origin story that makes his evil understandable, even excusable? The ending of Cruella suggests as much. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jun 16, 2021
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Final Account (2020) |
Accurate knowledge about the Holocaust is disturbingly low among Millennials and Gen Z Americans ... I hope this film is shown in high schools across America. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Jun 04, 2021
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The Father (2020) |
As we watch, we become painfully aware: this will happen to our parents one day. It will happen to us. Every human life is a progression of seasons. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted May 27, 2021
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My Octopus Teacher (2020) |
My Octopus Teacher represents at least two ways we can turn nature into a false teacher. - The Gospel Coalition
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| Posted Apr 08, 2021
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