The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Miracles are events outside the rules of the everyday world that come with no apparent cause and are seemingly attributable to divine agency ie. God.
Miracles can be everything from the parting of the Red Sea to the Immaculate Conception or appearances of the Virgin Mary. The most common form of miracles are healings and there is a seeming entire industry of people in the real world who promote themselves as faith healers.
There are several films dealing with the appearance of miracles or miracle workers in the modern world. In a number of works, these are often seen as ambiguous and quite possibly diabolic in nature.
Other works depict classic examples of miracles playing out in modern surroundings with different or comic results. A number of pro-faith works (see Christian Cinema) believe miracles will bring people to a belief in religion.
Peter Greenaway film about a woman claiming her baby is divinely conceived. As fascinating for Greenaway’s constant visual games as for the film’s brutal taboo-defying impact
The third Revelation Road film, this offers the bizarre novelty of a faith-based Mad Max copy with divinely inspired action hero David A.R. White cruising the post-apocalyptic wastelands in the aftermath of The Rapture
Reasonable budgeted film that does no more than rehash Devil Child cliches from The Omen – or even more so the basic plot of Servants of Twilight. Chuck Russell throws in lots of CGI effects to little effect
John Landis and Dan Aykroyd minus the late John Belushi revisit their cult classic but the reunion exercise smacks of poor judgement and emerges as a haphazard arrangement made only to exploit the appeal of the original
A wickedly irreverent and even occasionally blasphemous comedy in which God is a scruffy, bad-tempered man living in Brussels who spends all his time devising ways to make humans miserable
Stunning, emotionally raw work from Lars von Trier with Emily Watson as a wife in a small religious community who is driven to extremes of masochistic self-sacrifice in the belief she is saving her husband’s life
Comedy in which God appears to Jim Carrey and grants him His powers for one week. Expectedly the film is of zero theological depth and all about Carrey going completely over-the-top
A horror film about the life of Jesus as a child. That’s not quite what we end up getting but it is enough to give this a bizarre freakshow appeal and get this site watching. Behind that though, this is surprisingly traditional
Nicolas Roeg was one of the great directors of the 1970s, making works like Performance and Don’t Look Now. This was one of Roeg’s last films where Mark Harmon is killed in an accident but makes a miraculous resurrection
The first film in 24 years from Alejandro Jodorowsky, a surreal journey through his own childhood. Gone is Jodorowsky, the mad prophet of El Topo, replaced by a warm, wryly self-reflexive Jodorowsky looking back in on his own life
Incomprehensible surrealism from director Raul Ruiz about a doctor sent to investigate a village where miracles occur with commonplace regularity
Halfway reasonable Stephen King adapted tv mini-series. This has been placed in the directorial hands of King’s worst adapter Mick Garris who at least holds his worst tendencies in check
Irish made Found Footage film where the investigation into a seeming miracle at a Catholic orphanage uncovers a case of possession and assorted deviltry taking place
One of the best Disney animated films in some time. Set around a Colombian American family that have hereditary magic powers and live in a magical house, this comes with an enormous degree of colour and energy
Sequel to Bruce Almighty in which Steve Carell is transformed into a modern-day Noah. This was pitched to the Christian audiences but feels like a series of lame gags playing on Noah and the Ark devoid of any biblical context
Low-budget possession and exorcism supposedly based on a true story that cycles through most of the tropes of the genre. An earlier version of the same “true-life” possession depicted in The Ritual
An Acid Western was a Western made with a psychedelic trippiness. Directed by Robert Downey Jr’s father, this is a surreal work about a Christ-like visitor in a zoot suit who turns up in a Western town
Frank Darabont had a hit with the Stephen King adaptation The Shawshank Redemption. Here he makes another King adaptation about a Death Row inmate with healing powers
A controversy-laden Jean-Luc Godard film that offers an irreverent modern-day retelling of the Immaculate Conception. An amusing idea that vanishes under Godard’s pretensions
Warm and appealing film filled with great performances that takes place across two generations of an Italian-American family. An obsession with Catholic miracles takes over in the second half, although the film remains ambiguous to their actuality
Chuck Norris’s son Mike directs a laughably ridiculous faith-based film where a miraculous child appears, come to heal the people of an impoverished, drought-ridden town
A horror film where Sydney Sweeney stars as a virginal nun who appears to be experiencing an immaculate conception. This is only a slightly better version of The Nun
This is one of the great wacky titles of all time. The film has its deliberately ridiculous amusements but soon fails to provide an interesting enough show to live up to its title
The second of the Kirk Cameron Biblical End Times films. On one hand, these are quite competently made B movies; on the other the fundamentalist message is unpalatable
H.G. Wells scripted film with Roland Young as a man who suddenly finds he can perform miracles
Mike Flanagan returns with his best work to date. Effectively a Catholic version of Salem’s Lot, this comes with some flat out great pieces of writing
A ridiculously melodramatic Catholic historical drama wherein a statue of the Virgin Mary comes to life to take the place of a nun so she can run off and woo a young Roger Moore … A lushly made canvas but otherwise absurdly overwrought piety
One of a spate of miracle films during this period, Catholic nonsense with Jane Wyman and Van Johnson finding love that transcends death
A ghastly sanctimonious Catholic miracle film from the 1940s about the elevation of a Hollywood starlet to sainthood simply because she was glamorous
A film that could have only been made in the 1950s where the voice of God suddenly appears on the radio around the world. Starring later-to-be US First Lady Nancy Reagan
Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of the Biblical legend was mired in controversy. I can only applaud his decision to defy those who claim ownership of the story and set out to make an interesting film. Yet Noah remains an epic that never seems to quite fill the screen and a human drama that never quite comes to life
Amiable and quite likeable light fantasy in which supermarket manager John Denver receives a visit from God in the person of George Burns. This throws barbs in the direction of organised religion but in a way intended not to offend anybody
Sequel to Oh, God, this brings back George Burns as God but pairs him with a cute kid
Carl Dreyer, the Danish director of Vampyr and The Passion of Joan of Arc, is one of the least well-known great directors. This, his second-to-last film, concerns itself with the nature of religion and miracles. A very weighty Bergman-esque piece, it arrives at an astonishing ending
In the vein of Pasolini’s Teorema, French director Bruno Dumont makes a film about an ambiguous visitor who may be capable of miracles. Slow, very opaque but eventually rewarding
Mel Gibson wants to give us a film that shows Jesus’s suffering leading up to the Crucifixion but has taken it to such an extreme that he has actually created a Torture Porn film that gives the Saw and Hostel franchises a run for their money
The second animated film from DreamWorks, an impressively produced retelling of The Book of Exodus and the story of Moses.
Reasonable budgeted film about a series of Biblical plagues being visited upon a rural Louisiana town. An interesting set up that flounders amid a confused script
The second in a series of Biblical End Times films from Canada’s faith-based Cloud Ten Pictures, this offers the peculiarity of the Anti-Christ appearing in Virtual Reality
Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, a slow and weighty meditation upon questions of faith as one man prays to turn back a nuclear holocaust
Uneven New Zealand-made film where a girl meets a mystery man who claims that he is Jesus Christ
One of the greatest of all SF films from Andrei Tarkovsky about a mysterious zone filled with enigmatic alien phenomena at the centre of which exists a room that can grant one’s heart’s desire
This seems caught between offering an earnest theological debate about Catholicism and being a standard possession film. The results are not entirely uninteresting
One of the strangest films of the 1940s, featuring Clark Gable, Joan Crawford and others as a group of Devil’s Island escapees who realise during the course of their journey that one of the company is Jesus Christ
Pier Paolo Pasolini makes a film in which a Christ-like visitor appears, seduces all the members of an upper-class family and departs, leaving their lives changed. A fascinating study in the effects of religion on ordinary lives
Strange Australian film set in the Outback with Peter Coyote as an ambiguous stranger who claims to have been sent from God
Agnieszka Holland film with Ed Harris as a Catholic priest who has lost his faith who is asked defend the authenticity of a supposed miracle
The third in a series of Biblical End Times films withGary Busey as a decent cop who wakes up in a future ruled by the Anti-Christ. The heavy-handed slinging of Bible verses makes this hard-going for anyone who is not a believer, while the conspiratorial tone frequently verges on nuttiness
Adaptation of a James Herbert book about a deafmute girl who suddenly speaks and performs miracles, which may have a sinister cause
The novelty of the first Christian horror film. As opposed to much of the message-heavy tripe that usually gets peddled in this niche market, this is actually well structured with a number of interesting ambiguities and engaging as a story for the better part
One of the key films in the cult of Takashi Miike that has been frequently banned for its taboo-defying outrages in which a mysterious visitor causes a family household to descend into perverse extremes
Akiva Goldsman, a screenwriter who has laid a trail of devastation through the genre, attempts to film a classic fantasy novel that has aptly described as unfilmable, resulting in a curtailed story that works in individual scenes but is mostly a spawling patchwork of fantasy elements and a romance that never seems to spark
Oddball film set in an afterlife for suicides. You keep expecting the film to burst out into a vein of rich black comedy that never comes and you are left with a film that feels as though it is being eccentric for the sake of it.