Even Our Biggest Haters Have A ‘Confession’ To Make

It’s finally here.

We’ve been telling you about it for weeks at this point. We have a brand-new movie, “Confession.” It is out tonight. It is one of the most pro-Christian, anti-communist movies ever filmed, with an amazing cast.

It’s precisely what America needs right now. It’s so good that even the people who hate us can’t dismiss it.

The film stars Rob Lowe, James Franco, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Brad Dourif, Richard Brake, Emile Hirsch; a huge cast directed by Venice Golden Lion nominee Václav Marhoul.

The reviews are already dropping, and they’re pretty stunning. Rod Dreher, a reviewer for The Free Press, wrote:

I just finished an advanced copy of confession, out November 11. Words fail. One of the most philosophically and theologically profound films I’ve ever seen, and one of the most deeply Christian.

David Limbaugh, a Protestant thought leader, wrote:

I watched Ben Shapiro’s movie Confession today. Oh my gosh, is it fabulous.

Father Jason Charron of the Ukrainian Catholic Church saw an advance copy and said:

The mark of a good movie is that it is able to make you forget the world for a moment, but the mark of a great movie is its revelation to the viewer of the state of his own soul in this world. For that reason, Confession is a great movie. … A seasoned soul is invigorated by the tension between past failure and present redemption. And that tension is played out in other areas as well: Past weakness and present strength, past cowardice-present conviction. Past self- preservation/present self-sacrifice. So that tension is there throughout the movie, and the film respects your mind enough to take you through those struggles without a barrage of gratuitous stimulation and without having to force-feed you all kinds of, of prepackaged answers.

Coptic Orthodox Father Anthony Morad enthused:

It was so refreshing to watch a movie that reminds us of who we’re supposed to be as human beings, where virtues like truth and beauty and honor and integrity and self-respect are highlighted and promoted.

Christian Toto, who is a reviewer for Hollywood in Toto and founded his publication specifically because he saw the insane bias of the Hollywood press, wrote:

It’s brainy and raw, making the most of its limited setting to tell a grim tale of faith and endurance. Stark close-ups, intriguing camera angles, purposeful dances of light and dark, Confession never feels claustrophobic or stale creatively speaking. It helps that Rob Lowe and James Franco make a dynamite duo confidently steering this stark two-hander. Their intellectual battles play out like an academic food fight, with plenty of literary references for the book nerd in your life.

Shapiro leavens the dialogue with sharply-observed details and bittersweet notes. Nick Nolte uses that sandpaper voice for a harrowing tale from beyond the prison’s walls. Jennifer Jason Leigh snags a meaty sequence to convince Alexei he’s choosing the wrong path.

Even outlets you would expect to hate the film, like The Hollywood Reporter and Slate, have to admit its virtues. The Hollywood Reporter praises the film’s director, Václav Marhoul — who is, in fact, a genius. He had to film the entire movie in what is essentially a prison. The film has virtually no exterior shots.

The Hollywood Reporter admitted the director “infuses the film with a suitably gritty, intense tone, abetted by cinematographer Peter Menzi Jr’s strikingly harsh visuals.”

Specific praise for Nick Nolte: “He plays a Jewish inmate, giving him the opportunity to deliver a harrowing monologue about atrocities he’s witnessed.” Emile Hirsch: “plays a former concert pianist with an unnatural, cheerful attitude.” Richard Brake: “… giving the film’s most effective performance, plays a hardened, cynical prisoner who coaches Alexi on how to survive.”

Far-Left Slate was as begrudging as you can be: “Surprisingly, ‘Confession’ actually feels passively like a real movie.” And then the reviewer (who appeared to like the film and didn’t want to admit it) wrote, “I’ll make my own confession. I enjoyed seeing James Franco on screen again. Broadened out in middle age after his years out of the spotlight, he uses his shifty eyes and bleep-eating grin to good purpose in playing Vladimir, a violent and bitter person whose experience in the trenches we assume during World War I has turned him into someone who believes only in power. Franco has always had a treacherous charm.”

Let’s get real. The mainstream Hollywood reviewers despise that we are playing in their sandbox.

All the major reviewers are reviewing “Confession.” All of them for the first time. They have to; the cast is too big; the director is too talented; the movie is, frankly, too good.

But here’s the thing: They also have to try to strangle our movie business in the crib. They have to try to strangle anything that tilts conservative in the crib. They must.

They’re so angry. We’re playing in their sandbox; all of their sandboxes, really, because we’re not just making a film here. We’ve made films before.

What we are doing here is artistic drama with serious themes, all-time great performances, extraordinary direction, and great artistic ability from the whole crew.

That is what they can’t stand. They cannot allow this.

Just to show you how hilarious this is, here’s how that Hollywood Reporter review opened, revealing the mentality.

Remember, this is the opening of the review:

Reviewing the new movie scripted by Ben Shapiro. I’m tempted to pan it on ideological grounds. The screenwriter, after all, is the controversial right wing political commentator who co-founded The Daily Wire. To say that the vast majority of his views are loathsome to me is an understatement.

That is crazy. The Hollywood Reporter has never run a review that opens by ripping the politics of the person who wrote the film or produced the film.

Eli Steele pointed this out on X, writing, “This is utterly disqualifying for a film critic. Films are not easy to make. People give their all to bring their talents together, to put a vision into the screen. And a curmudgeon critic comes along and spits on all that as he makes the movie about his own politics.”

That came in response to Christian Toto commenting on the Hollywood Reporter’s review: “This is why I started Hollywood in Toto 12 years ago.”

This behavior isn’t disqualifying for a film critic: it is required. It must happen. The Hollywood reviewers at the mainstream publications must do their “land acknowledgment.”

You see, I am bad. You are bad. All conservatives, people who don’t think as they do, are bad. You’re not allowed in the sandbox.

By way of comparison, this is a recent Hollywood Reporter review of Andres Veiel’s documentary “Riefenstahl,” about Leni Riefenstahl. For those who don’t know Leni Riefenstahl, she was literally Hitler’s film propagandist. Here’s part of the review:

No matter how much we might want to purge the ideology reflected by and reinforced in Leni Riefenstahl’s films from our cultural lives, her aesthetic influence is impossible to escape. … Everything stems from the grammar established by Riefenstahl in 1938’s Olympia, just as so much of what we view as the aesthetics of political power finds a template in her 1935 Triumph of the Will.

To The Hollywood Reporter, it’s not just about me, because anyone who shares any of my views is loathsome for being a mainstream conservative. And even more, they would be loathsome for making a quality film that opposes Soviet Marxism and positively represents Christianity.

This is the same Hollywood that gave a standing ovation to Roman Polanski at the Oscars, who pleaded guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl. The same Hollywood that for decades looked the other way at Harvey Weinstein and stacked up Oscars for him.

We’re the loathsome ones.

It’s the same Hollywood Reporter that recently reviewed Paul Thomas Anderson’s insanely left-wing propaganda piece “One Battle After Another.” (Note: If you didn’t take the time to watch it and wish to save breaths in your life, don’t.)

That film is basically a film about a white supremacist coalition that rules America, and it can only be thwarted by black or Marxist revolutionaries and illegal immigrants. The review stated:

One Battle After Another is the rare American film released in these benighted times of ours — with the backing of a major studio, no less — to be clear and insistent in the target of its anger, its despair and its prescriptions for what might make things better.

Anderson does not operate with blinkered hope; his movie pays sober reverence to the brutal losses suffered already and to those inevitably to come. But he insists, in his film’s glorious and just-shy-of-corny final seconds, that there is still something like a future out there, past the smoke and ruin, worth struggling toward, inch by agonizing inch. The title of the film could be read as an exhausted lament. It could be a rallying cry, too.

Don’t worry, though; The Hollywood Reporter isn’t political. It’s just about quality, not politics.

This isn’t anything new. When Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” came out in 2004, the major critics roundly ripped it. It was the top-grossing R-rated film in American history at the time. And it currently sits at 50% on Rotten Tomatoes. “One Battle After Another”? 96% on Rotten Tomatoes.

“The Passion of the Christ” is at 50% on Rotten Tomatoes because this is how it works. You can’t play in their sandbox. Hollywood is always offended by anyone who plays in their sandbox.

But we are so deep in their sandbox at this point they can’t ignore us, which is why they’re all reviewing us  — so they can try to stop us. 

They can’t ignore the fact that the film is not only good, but it has amazing acting, great direction, and all the rest, adding up to an amazing film.

They’ll do their best.

But it’s too late for that game.

We’re already winning, and that is only possible because of you.