From Forbes-Movie review web sites are an important tool for my family in deciding whether a film is worth the time and money to watch. But this strategy has its limits. Take the example of Christian-themed films. If I visit a film review site and the critics’ reviews are somewhere around 30% positive, but the reviews from people who actually watched the film are in the vicinity of 80% or more positive, the pattern is clear: The film is conservative and/or Christian, and I can’t really trust the negative reviews. God's Not Dead got a critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes of 19%, but an audience rating of 76%. I've seen God's Not Dead and it doesn't remotely deserve the trashing that it got from critics.
This pattern of bias makes it all the more impressive that The Case for Christ has a Rotten Tomatoes score of almost 55%: That means that it was good enough to overcome the cultural biases of the movie mandarin class. And the film deserves its high critic and audience scores. It's theologically informative without being didactic, which is to say that it is a story which carries a message, instead of being a message with a story wrapped around it for delivery purposes. The story and the message are both true to life as well as true to Life. It tells the story of Lee Strobel, investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune and angry atheist. At least, he became angry after his wife converted to Christianity. He set out to de-convert her by disproving the story of the resurrection of Jesus. What Strobel found as he systematically combed through the forensic and eyewitness evidence, was that the deeper in he got, the more plausible the story became. When he was done, he was forced, reluctantly, to acknowledge that according to the evidence the Resurrection actually occurred. He concluded that Jesus had indeed come back to life.
More here-
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jerrybowyer/2017/09/25/the-case-for-the-case-for-christ-and-other-christian-themed-films/#360c7d2d1122
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