- Why are you so strict?
- What about movie review websites like Kids-In-Mind, or some of these Christian sites?
- Do you review all kinds of movies?
- Do you review new movies?
- Why don't your reviews have a "Positive Elements" section?
Why are you so strict?
Three reasons: 1) We believe movies are extremely influential in our culture, and we’re all called to be watchful. 2) We think seriously and multigenerationally about film, and we want to see this generation hand down a legacy of discernment and discipleship, rather than passivity and pluralism. 3) We would rather provide too much information and be thought strict, than too little and betray a more conservative family’s trust.
What about movie review websites like Kids-In-Mind, or some of these Christian sites?
Purity and Precision is an entirely Christian-staffed review ministry. Movie reviews from “secular” sources are never going to be what we need them to be, because they are not written from a deliberately Christian perspective. Unbelievers don’t mind much when a film militates against biblical Christianity, and they aren’t going to let you know when it does.
Mainstream Christian film review ministries serve a valuable purpose, in providing Christian reviews of newer films, or films that Christians should know about but don’t necessarily need to be exposed to in full. In some cases, however, while their commitment to the Christian perspective on many cultural issues is admirable, these ministries occasionally take a more moderate position on the exclusivity of the gospel, as well as on broader cultural issues like Marxism, feminism and humanism*.
Purity and Precision provides reviews from a self-consciously Christian perspective, as mainstream Christian reviewers do, but hopefully also provides a more penetrating look at the worldviews in film. For a list of some of the other standards that make Purity and Precision a unique ministry, click here.
Do you review all kinds of movies?
No. Our readership is limited primarily to people who aren’t even interested in R-rated horror flicks, and we don’t think we’re doing anyone a disservice by not reviewing them. We may not even review some of the films our readers would be interested in, simply because of our own level of comfort with certain kinds of content. For reviews on most R rated films, and some PG-13 films, we would have to simply point families to Plugged In or Movie Guide.
We do, however, review the old kind and the obscure kind of movies fairly frequently.
Do you review new movies?
We don’t review very many movies in the cinema—especially when we’re not completely certain that they will get a negative rating. There is no pause button in the movie theater, and no rewind. In short, it’s too easy to miss things in a film for us to generally feel comfortable recommending one without seeing it twice, or with a remote control handy. Movies recently released on DVD are occasionally reviewed fairly close to their release date, depending on how much interest we think they will have for our readers. In both cases—in-theaters and new-to-DVD movies—requests from readers have a great influence on our decision whether or not to review a particular film at a particular time.
Why don’t your reviews have a “Positive Elements” section?
They do. It’s called the conclusion.
Basically, the lack of a Positive Elements section in Purity and Precision is owing to its general irrelevance to the point of the review. If the movie gets a positive rating and has a hundred positive elements, we will most likely state that fact, praise the movie because of it, and probably give a few significant examples; but we’re not going to give away the plot for the sake of mentioning every last good thing that happened in it; neither are we going to waste our readers’ time by being minute in explaining why we think the film is worth their attention.
Conversely, if a film gets a negative review, we will probably qualify our warnings about the negative elements by providing positive elements that directly relate to them (for instance, if a false worldview claim is contradicted by another character, or by the same character later in the film). However, we’re not going to try to weigh a positive element like honesty or generosity against a negative element like humanism or homosexual behavior, as if a movie with an emphasis on the bad could be redeemed by an equal emphasis on the good. If the good points of the movie have no direct bearing on the effect of the negative ones, there are very few negative reviews, if any, that would benefit readers more by having a separate list of Positive Elements.
If you have a question that is not answered here, please contact us.
