The Gospel According to Movieguide

Decoding the Bullshit of One of the Culture Wars' Most Insidious Operators

Stills: Warner Bros; Universal

CW: racist violence, the slave trade, and sexual assault.

Below is a redacted excerpt of a movie review. See if you can guess the film in question.

[T]he movie delivers a fun and exciting, but scary and sometimes violent, ride. Also, the movie provides an uplifting, center-right message about putting family and children first, before one’s career. Thus, █████ has an anti-feminist message that leans toward conservative, traditional values.

What traditionalist, socially conservative film might this be? One of those faith-based indie movies like God’s Not Dead (2014) or I Can Only Imagine (2018) that crop up in theaters from time to time? Perhaps a Hallmark or Lifetime romance that celebrates quiet, small-town life? Good guesses, but no. The film described above is none other than the 2022 campy horror film M3GAN, about a murderous robot doll that does cute little dances before hacking people to death. The android also at one point rips off a 12-year-old’s ear and dispatches an annoying neighbor with a pressure washer. Conservative, traditional values? The fuck? (Though I should note, I myself quite like the movie.)

Per the review, because M3GAN focuses on a woman who takes in her recently orphaned niece and becomes less of a workaholic in the process, the film reflects a wholesome, family-values worldview. Such is the logic of Movieguide, an evangelical Christian nonprofit the screens movies and TV series for their suitability for families that wish to live in harmony with biblical principles. Founded in 1985 by Ted Baehr as a magazine, Movieguide shifted to TV, radio, and eventually the web, where its reviews number in the thousands.

I first encountered Movieguide, quite by accident, when my daughter was in pre-school. I was looking for more straightforward movie recon like “Does the dog die in this movie?” or “Is this film age-apropriate? The secular and generally excellent Common Sense Media has become my source for such answers, but I periodically return to Movieguide gawk at its unhinged evaluations.

Today, in a departure from my normal topics, I analyze a number of Movieguide reviews, which range from shockingly dumb to unintentionally hilarious to appallingly retrograde. What I find most fascinating, though, is the way these reviews tend to fold in other right-wing ideas that are not explicitly Christian, such as the valorization of capitalism, the decrying of environmentalism, an aggressive distaste for feminism, and racist apologia. As you will see, more often than not, Movieguide¹ says the quiet parts out loud.

What I find most fascinating, though, is the way these reviews tend to fold in other right-wing ideas that are not explicitly Christian, such as the valorization of capitalism, the decrying of environmentalism, an aggressive distaste for feminism, and racist apologia. More often than not, Movieguide says the quiet parts out loud.

Let me put my cards on the table: I am agnostic on matters of faith and my politics are unapologetically progressive, as even casual readers of Material Ghosts likely know. But it’s not Movieguide’s piety with which I take issue. One of my heroes, the late André Bazin, was a devout Catholic, and his faith was fundamental to his writing on cinema, and it’s hard to discuss one of my favorite filmmakers, Terrence Malick, without recourse to religion. I’m also a fan of Josh Larsen’s thoughtful criticism at Christianity Today and on the Filmspotting podcast. No, what I object to is how Baehr’s publication’s extrapolations from Christianity are used to prop up its reactionary politics. At a time in America when diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are in the crosshairs and trans rights are under fire, it’s instructive to examine closely the tactics of some of the Culture Wars’ loudest — and most hypocritical — combatants, like Movieguide.

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Movieguide evaluates both the content and purported ideology of the texts it reviews. On the recent Ryan Gosling film The Fall Guy (2024), for instance, Movieguide tallies the coarse language and gestures: “26 obscenities (including two ‘f’ words and many ‘s’ words), one profanity using the word Christ, six GD profanities, 13 light profanities, some obscene gestures flipping a bad person off.” It also notes that there are “no sex scenes,” only one “romantic kiss,” and “brief upper male nudity.”

It’s the qualitative analysis that’s more revealing of the site’s politics, however. Let’s start with a film that earns high marks from Movieguide: The Dark Knight Rises (2012). The film, it concludes, is “intense but not bloody” and “keep[s] you on the edge of seat.” Moreover,

villains are transformed, people find hope and faith, and good is victorious. Also, communism, revolution, envy, greed, and mob rule are shown to be bad. Meanwhile, the good is shown as self-sacrificing, loyal, redemptive, and concerned about other people.

For people of faith and values, The Dark Knight Rises is an entertaining epic treat. For those on the side of the Occupy Power to the People movement, Batman exposes their nefarious, destructive ways, and they will not appreciate it.

Contrast this take on a film the site admires with one it clearly doesn’t: the 2012 animated adaptation of the Dr. Seuss children’s book, The Lorax. Both book and film are fables about the ways humans wreck the planet, but note how Movieguide frames these environmental themes in economic terms:

[L]ike the book, The Lorax is highly environmentalist to the point of suggesting that individual capitalism and free enterprise is [sic] bad, and that any quest to make money and be an entrepreneur will inevitably result in the planet’s destruction. In The Lorax, all businessmen are inherently evil and control society […], both financially and politically, in a policed, fascist-like state.

Any effort to make money will lead to the earth’s demise? All businessmen are evil? That’s quite the leap. The editorializing gets truly unhinged, though, in the site’s discussion of Avatar (2009):

Avatar is a visually stunning, but shallow and abhorrent, adventure pitting evil human capitalists against heroic, spiritually in-tune alien creatures on the planet Pandora. […] [I]ts New Age, pagan worldview contains extremely anti-capitalist content with a strong Marxist overtone. It promotes group-think and argues in favor of the destruction of the human race.

[…] The truth is that we live in amazing luxury today under capitalism, compared to what we’d have if we lived like Pandora’s aliens. Would you like to get up each morning from a hammock in a tree and hunt for food with a bow and arrow?

Funnily enough, there are countless tropical resorts dedicated to this very experience. Please, don’t threaten me with a good time!

Image: Sandals Resorts

So environmentalism is a bugbear for the folks at Movieguide. So, too, is feminism, or at least the caricatured version they advance. In the review of the tepid white-teacher-in-a-Black-school drama Freedom Writers (2007), Movieguide flags the film’s “very strong moral worldview [that] encourages young people to do the right thing, tell the truth, be kind, be polite, treat others with respect.” And despite “avoid[ing] multiculturalism and the identity politics of envy,” Freedom Writers regrettably contains “a silly feminist element” when the married protagonist “writes ‘Ms.”’ before her last name” on the blackboard. The nerve!

And then there’s the review of Sarah Polley’s Women Talking (2022). I’ll let Movieguide summarize the film for those who haven’t seen it.

Women Talking is […] about a small group of women in an isolated Mennonite community [who debate what course of action to take] […] after it’s discovered that a few of the menfolk secretly have been raping some of the women after incapacitating them with animal tranquilizer.

Notice those qualifiers: a few men, some women. Movieguide takes umbrage that the survivors of these heinous attacks arrive at the position that

the male elders in their church are part of a system that sees women as second-class citizens. […] [T]he women [are] up against a system that teaches young boys and men to think of women as inferior. This, of course, is simplistic nonsense about the power of the “patriarchy.”

For these faults, the film is labeled as “excessive and unacceptable.”

Equally startling is Movieguide’s persistent defense of racism and chattel slavery via whatabout-ist deflection and appeals to both-sides balance. The site lauds the 1989 Civil War epic Glory, about an all-Black Union infantry, for providing “a biblical moral lesson about overcoming racism through reconciliation, not rebellion or revenge.” Elsewhere, it bemoans Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), concerning a freedman’s efforts to liberate his enslaved wife from a merciless plantation owner, as revising history “just to make the United States and the South seem as evil as possible.” Movieguide similarly laments that Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997), a historical drama about a group of Africans who commandeer the ship intended to deliver them into slavery, “neglect[ed] to show the fanaticism and extremism in the abolitionist movement.” But Spielberg ultimately redeems himself by “showing that Africans themselves sold people into slavery,” thus striking “a rare historical balance” for a Hollywood film.

And it’s not just claims of past racism that Movieguide seeks to balance. Take their review of Fruitvale Station (2013), Ryan Coogler’s dramatization of the real-life killing of Oscar Grant, a Black man, at the hands of white transit police in 2009. No other review on the site so perfectly reflects its twin impulses towards editorialization and logical contortionism and the tangential lengths to which it will go to explain away any and all events that would challenge their ideological worldview.

On the one hand, the review applauds Coogler for not turning the movie into “a strident diatribe” on police brutality, because, in their eyes, the shooting rendered on screen “comes across as unintentional.” On the other hand, Coogler fails to convey “the loud chaos of the crowd surrounding the police officers on the subway platform,” nor does the director show that “they were clearly afraid.” Worse, “the movie depicts the police officers’ actions before the shooting as very heavy handed.” I can only assume the reviewer is referring to a moment in the film where a cops calls Grant a “bitch-ass n———” — even though that line was literally captured on cell phone video and admitted into evidence during the trial. Heavy handed, indeed.

But the anonymous reviewer is just getting warmed up. He uses Fruitvale Station as an opportunity to climb atop his soapbox and weigh on an entirely separate police shooting of an unarmed Black person: one Trayvon Martin. Martin, however, does not warrant a single mention by name in the review — because he’s not the one for whom the author is circling the wagons. Forgive me for quoting at length, but I wish to convey the full scope of this paragraph’s bullshit:

Ultimately, therefore, Fruitvale Station is likely to spread more heat than light. Especially in light of the recent politically charged, controversial case involving George Zimmerman, an Hispanic man accused of murdering a 17-year-old black teenager in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman claims he shot the teenager in self-defense after the teenager started to reach for Zimmerman’s holstered gun, and even some top liberal legal scholars are saying that the prosecution didn’t prove their second-degree murder case against Zimmerman. Apparently, the prosecution in Oscar Grant’s death didn’t prove their case either, and the transit officer was only convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

By highlighting the shooter’s race, the reviewer is plainly seeking to undermine the idea that racial animus contributed to the altercation; and as his gun was holstered, Zimmerman clearly meant no harm to the teenager whom he surveilled from his home, his car, and on foot, despite directives from law enforcement not to do so; and “even some top [uncited] liberal scholars” are saying it, more and more people are saying it. Apparently.

Throughout its thousands of reviews, Movieguide rails about “upper male nudity” and “woke feminism” and “pagan worldviews.” It’s consistent in that regard, but hardly coherent. It bitches about the rhetorical tactics of the Left in one piece only to deploy them for its own purposes in another. “Intersectionality,” in its estimation, “operates on the math of privilege points and victim points,” parroting the tired notion that progressives like to maintain an identity scorecard to shame contemporary white folks for their historical sins.

But Movieguide likes to keep score, too. Based on the excerpts I’ve provided, the reader might assume that the site would be over the moon about a film like Green Book (2018), which was inspired by the true story of an accomplished Black pianist and his boorish white chauffeur reconciling their racial differences while traveling through the segregated Deep South in 1962. And you’d be right. Kinda.

Green Book, the site says, delivers “a powerful message of loving each person no matter his skin color or background,” as the two characters “must learn from each other and see their point of view.” And as a bonus, the film provides “a strong moral viewpoint” with “lessons given to not steal, curse, lie, or use violence.” And yet, and yet: Don Shirley, the real-life person Mahershala Ali portrays in the film, just so happens to have been queer, and the movie suggests as much in one solitary scene. Out comes Movieguide’s scorecard:

[N]ear the end, Dr. Shirley is seen wrapped in a towel with another man, implying they had just engaged in homosexual relations. This completely unnecessary scene takes viewers out of the movie and adds another level to the story that was completely not needed. What the LGBTQ community has gone through over the years is nothing like the harsh treatment and brutality that African Americans went through in America during segregation. Modern day movements that put a correlation on the two things is belittling to what African Americans endured.

Movieguide advises extreme caution for Green Book.

How dare the filmmakers acknowledge the lived experience of a person who endured attacks and viable threats to his life not only because of his race but also because of his sexuality! That is an insult to Black people! Today, the movie is reviled as one of the worst Best Picture winners in history precisely because it’s Chicken Soup for the Status Quo’s soul, a comforting cinematic dish for those who believe racism to be a matter of individual hateful hearts and not a systemic and entrenched societal plague. But that produces no friction at all for Movieguide, unlike the tiniest suggestion of homosexuality, which once again makes plain the site’s actual political project.

The true reach and influence of organizations like Movieguide may be difficult to quantify. What matters more than this particular website, however, is the playbook. The tactics of selectively invoking Christian values and weaponizing religion through misinformation, hypocrisy, and bad-faith argumentation predate the internet itself. These are some of the Right's most effective and prized tools. What could be more vile, more insidious, than to cloak an agenda of hatred in the language of love? Good people of conscience — from all points along the political spectrum — have found themselves surveying the wrecked political landscape of America and wondering to themselves, “How did we get here?” The answer: this way.

1. None of the reviews on Movieguide contain a byline. Without a critic to name, I refer to the website as the author. Also, any text that appears in bold is my emphasis, not Movieguide’s.