Victor Morton on “Red-State Cinema”

I’m excerpting the relevant bit:

Lastly, what’s your favorite “conservative”/right-wing film of the year so far?

None of the usual suspects are great, frankly — I don’t like affirmative action in any of its forms, and I won’t pretend that these films are better than they are. (Feel free to cite from my past writings linked to below.) For Greater Glory was a resolutely old-fashioned historical kinda-Western drama about the Cristero War in Mexico that could imagine Henry Hathaway or John Sturges making it in the 1950s; I graded it 6/10. The documentaries U.N. Me was watchable and sometimes funny but too sloppily edited and constructed (5/10).

There are great movies out there for conservatives and religious folks to love (all these films I’ll name are among my annual Top 10), but they’re not the kinds of films like this that yourself and others ask me about. If you want a film portraying a loving Christian marriage, the best film of the year is The Planet of Snail, a South Korean documentary about a blind artist and his handicapped wife that never played outside a couple of festivals and NY/LA. The best film about fatherlessness and gratuitous grace is not Courageous but the year’s best film overall — The Kid with a Bike by Belgium’s Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. I said on a Christian board that I wanted to drag the Kendricks to that film and slap them upside the head with it.

For anti-liberal, anti-PC satire, Sasha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator is unbeatable in the rude-and-crude school, while Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress has a more high-toned take on the subject of virtue in a post-PC college world. Great dramas about the damage of adultery and heedless Romanticism include Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea and Romanian film Tuesday, After Christmas, but there’s no point in recommending either of these films to someone who’s gonna be offended by a boob shot or a genital glimpse.

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