I went to a screening of Woodlawn last Saturday. Directed by Birmingham brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin, the film tells the true story of revival among the players on the football team at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham during a racially tense period of the 1970s.

The film focuses on Tony Nathan, the tailback who takes the position from a white teammate and becomes a star. The real-life Tony Nathan went on to play at Alabama and for the Miami Dolphins.

It’s a moving story, with some high-pitched emotional scenes. The acting is good, especially Jon Voight as Bear Bryant, Nic Bishop as Woodlawn’s coach, Tandy Gerelds, and Caleb Castille who plays Nathan in his first film. Technically, Evangelical films have come a long way.

The large crowd at the screening cheered when Woodlawn scored a winning touchdown, shouted when Tony Nathan dodged a tackle, laughed at the punch lines. It was a very into-it crowd.

Yet I came away from the film dissatisfied, as I do from many films by Evangelicals. I think there are a number of reasons for that dissatisfaction, but at base the problem is theological (ain’t it always).

Evangelicalism is a word religion. I’m a big fan of words, but even talking pictures aren’t fundamentally about words. It’s no accident that the hall of fame for directors has a large share of Catholics (Fellini, Hitchcock, Scorsese), Orthodox (Tarkovsky, Eisenstein), and sacramental Protestants (Bergman, Malick). This can’t be the whole story, of course, since aniconic Judaism has produced some of the world’s great filmmakers. But there’s something to it: Evangelical films over-explain, over-talk. They don’t trust the images to do the work.

Read the article “Why Evangelical Films Often Fail” on firstthings.com.