:: Movies

Bowling for Columbine did it to the gun culture. Super Size Me did it to fast food. Now The God Who Wasn't There does it to religion.

Holding modern Christianity up to a bright spotlight, this eye-opening documentary asks the questions few dare to ask. "Did Jesus even exist?" is just the beginning for The God Who Wasn't There. Your guide through the world of Christendom is former fundamentalist Brian Flemming, joined by such luminaries as Jesus Seminar fellow Robert M. Price, author Sam Harris and historian Richard Carrier.

The opening and closing moments of Robert Zemeckis's Contact astonish viewers with the sort of breathtaking conceptual imagery one hardly ever sees in movies these day--each is an expression of the heroine's lifelong quest (both spiritual and scientific) to explore the meaning of human existence through contact with extraterrestrial life. The movie begins by soaring far out into space, then returns dizzyingly to earth until all the stars in the heavens condense into the sparkle in one little girl's eye. It ends with that same girl as an adult (Jodie Foster)--her search having taken her to places beyond her imagination--turning her gaze inward and seeing the universe in a handful of sand. Contact traces the journey between those two visual epiphanies. Based on Carl Sagan's novel, Contact is exceptionally thoughtful and provocative for a big-budget Hollywood science fiction picture, with elements that recall everything from 2001 to The Right Stuff. Foster's solid performance (and some really incredible alien hardware) keep viewers interested, even when the story skips and meanders, or when the halo around the golden locks of rising-star-of-a-different-kind Matthew McConaughey (as the pure-Hollywood-hokum love interest) reaches Milky Way-level wattage. Ambitious, ambiguous, pretentious, unpredictable--Contact is all of these things and more. Much of it remains open to speculation and interpretation, but whatever conclusions one eventually draws, Contact deserves recognition as a rare piece of big-budget studio filmmaking on a personal scale.

Astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan is host and narrator of this 13-hour series that originally aired on Public Broadcasting Stations in the United States. Dr. Sagan describes the universe in a way that appeals to a mass audience, by using Earth as a reference point, by speaking in terms intelligible to non-scientific people, by relating the exploration of space to that of the Earth by pioneers of old, and by citing such Earth legends as the Library of Alexandria as metaphors for space-related future events. Among Dr. Sagan's favorite topics are the origins of life, the search for life on Mars, the infernal composition of the atmosphere of Venus and a warning about a similar effect taking place on Earth due to global pollution and the "greenhouse effect", the lives of stars, interstellar travel and the effects of attaining the speed of light, the danger of mankind technologically self-destructing, and the search, using radio technology, for intelligent life in deep space.

Kevin Smith's Dogma is at once irreverent and respectful, daffy and devout. It's the cinematic equivalent of paging through a religious textbook and coloring in Apostles' teeth in the picture of the Last Supper, drawing Jesus a pair of glasses - while simultaneously highlighting the important and significant passages. It opens with one of the funniest disclaimers in recent film memory and takes off on a riotous ride from there.

Loki (Matt Damon) and Bartleby (Ben Affleck) are two fallen angels banished from heaven to a place much worse than hell -Wisconsin. Their opportunity for redemption arrives in the person of Cardinal Glick (George Carlin), who offers plenary indulgence - absolution from all sin - to anyone who walks through the doors of his rededicated New Jersey church.

In The Devil's Advocate Al Pacino takes his turn as the great Satan, and clearly relishes his chance to raise hell. He's a New York lawyer, of course, by the name of John Milton, who recruits a hotshot young Florida attorney (Keanu Reeves) to his firm and seduces him with tempting offers of power, sex, and money. Think of the story as a twist on John Grisham's The Firm, with the corporate evil made even more explicit. Reeves is wooden, and therefore doesn't seem to have much of a soul to lose, but he's really just our excuse to meet the devil. Pacino's the main attraction, gleefully showing off his--and the Antichrist's--chops at perpetrating menace and mayhem.