Perhaps there are Christians who will appreciate The Shack's Oprahfied universal heaven, wherein no bad deed goes punished. But it made us pine for the Book of Job God to spitefully hurl leviathans and behemoths.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 28, 2017

Making a sincere film about religious faith is a tricky thing to pull off. And this folksy dose of misguided manipulation demonstrates many of the common pitfalls.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jun 11, 2017

Touchy-feely New Age therapy runs headlong into evangelical Christianity in The Shack.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 9, 2017

Good intentions, but far too earnest to appeal to anyone beyond those who believe you can fight a true crisis of the soul with a campfire and some Kumbaya.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 8, 2017

The film could have been just crazy enough to be brilliant, but it winds up looking like a wet weekend at Christian Disneyland.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jun 8, 2017

Modern-day Christian parables don't come any stodgier or more syrupy than this.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jun 7, 2017

To the film's credit is its willingness to dip into the deep end of dark matters instead of shying away from harsh truths and hard-earned faithlessness. Still, The Shack plods toward the Almighty - even when its characters are walking on water.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Mar 9, 2017

If Octavia Spencer is God, then Lord, take me to church.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 6, 2017

It's one of those movies where you'll either decide to give in right away and sob for two hours straight or opt to fight it while your resentment slowly simmers to a rolling boil.

| Original Score: C- | Mar 3, 2017

Based on the sleeper bestseller by Canadian author William P. Young, The Shack offers an enlightening - if dispiriting - vantage on contemporary, non-denominational Christianity.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 3, 2017

The Shack wants to be a sincere exploration of faith and forgiveness but somehow manages to be both too innocuous and too off-putting for its own good.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 3, 2017

"The Shack" is a grief-packed journey through loss, bargaining and acceptance that feels like an overly long church sermon.

| Original Score: C | Mar 3, 2017

Most of its running time is taken with mollifying conversations between Mack and the movie's New Age-meets-Bible Belt oversimplifications of the Holy Trinity. It fits right into a long tradition of quasi-mystical pseudo-parables.

| Original Score: D | Mar 2, 2017

When Worthington and his wacky trio are allowed to loosen up, The Shack radiates with undeniable sweetness, but the darker elements grind it to an unnerving halt.

| Original Score: C-- | Mar 2, 2017

Its idea that God loves us enough to reach out to every one of us in our the way we are best able to understand is genuinely touching.

| Original Score: B | Mar 2, 2017

Inspirational books are one thing, inspirational films are another. Readers conjure up worlds of their own, filmgoers are stuck with what's on the screen.

| Mar 2, 2017

Even its jolts of surrealism feel curiously stilted; what it needed was a director whose reverence would be tempered by a healthy sense of the ludicrous, an ability to tap into and draw out the material's stranger undercurrents.

| Mar 2, 2017

God can meet people even in the kitschy and maudlin, just as he meets people even in suffering and tragedy. (Not that this justifies either.)

| Original Score: C | Mar 2, 2017

For a faith-based film that aims to promote spiritual healing and prescribe forgiveness, The Shack is almost unforgivably joyless and visually bland.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 2, 2017

"The Shack" is unshakable in its religious message, and that's admirable in a cynical world. But viewed objectively as cinema, it's just not a very good film.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 2, 2017