demhier The director has a very good grasp of creating visual pleasing experiences. The imagery has a lot of creativity and imagination. It may come across as jarring or pretentious with all those "unnecessary" stylistic choices, but nonetheless all of them are interesting in their own right. The direction is playful and it looks very expensive and cinematic. From extreme wide shots, extreme close-ups, dutch angles, shallow focus, split diopter, lateral tracking shots, cg aided compositing, miniatures, the mundane and miraculous... you name it. Kind of like Brian de Palma but much more over the top. The playfulness seems to strive for an otherworldly and humorous feel. On the other hand it is heart-warming.Unfortunately the movie feels a little long and that is due to its structure. The plot is somewhat weak and there is no tension or ticking clock element. The division into episodes feels a little stop-and-go and that can be tiring. The overarcing story gets rather murky as a result. And there is a literal deus ex machina. In every other movie that would be bad but it fits this particular premise. Also they neglected to give god a character arc. He just gets humiliated with no redemption.In a lot of ways this movie is like Mr Nobody by the same director. Same strengths, same weaknesses.With all that said, I think this filmmaker should be making movies more frequently. Maybe hire another screenwriter but keep making movies nonstop.

sol- 'Le Tout Nouveau Testament' - also known as 'The Brand New Testament' - Benoît Poelvoorde plays God as rarely depicted on screen in this daring comedy from Belgium. Far from a compassionate deity, Poelvoorde is mischievous, mean-spirited middle aged man who spends all day in a tatty bathrobe, making humankind suffer for his own amusement. This set-up is initially hard to digest due to the slew of unanswered questions that it evokes, but fortunately Pili Groyne, cast as his daughter, soon comes in focus. The plot has Groyne sneak into her father's office and send text messages to everyone stating exactly when they will die, with some great moments in which various people react to the news; Gaspard Pauwels has a hilarious bit part as an internet blogger who repeatedly tries to kill himself to defy his designated death date. The plot also has Pili interview half a dozen would-be apostles in order to write the new testament of the title, something which is sometimes too sentimental for its own good. Then again, as her interviews are cut around scenes of Poelvoorde trying to catch up to her in the outside world, there is still quite a bit of humour to be add. Indeed, the funniest scenes have Poelvoorde undone by all the ridiculous rules he has written for the world and frequently bashed up by his own people who think he is delirious when claiming to be a deity.

Tom Dooley God is alive and is a self obsessed bully living a slob existence in modern day Brussels. Now if that floats your boat then this may be for you. His daughter is tired of his nasty ways and decides to escape the prison her home has become and write a brand New Testament – but she will need some help.Now this started off being a bit dumbed down and then it got better in that it brought in some interesting ideas that could be seen as ecumenical or even existential and sets them in a quasi comic role. It also is bound to upset certain religious types in its depiction of one, white, male god who is clearly a Christian. Under the skin of this film though I felt that the real message was one of love being the strength of the human spirit and that is what pulled it back for me. There are some good performances but most of the comedy was of the schadenfreude ilk, and this should in no way be compared to 'The Life of Bryan' in case this has any seeming parallels. It is in French with good to OK sub titles, so if you fancy a light heated poke at deities then this may be for you

maurice yacowar Even more explicitly than Howard Hawks's Red River, The Brand New Testament replays the transition from the harsh vengeful god of the Old Testament to the loving forgiving deity of the New. Where the John Wayne authority gives way to the sensitive Montgomery Clift in that Western, here the father/God's cruelty and arbitrariness are rejected by the young daughter who revolts against him. Of course that's how a genre can accommodate an archetypal myth. Here the genre is the family sit-com. JC, the father/God's son, has escaped the family but hasn't been able to improve the world sufficiently. Hence the contemporary setting, where God has preferred a murderous absurd world for his own amusement. The son having failed, now the feminine has to intervene. The young daughter Ea is the main heroine but she is abetted when her long suppressed mother — amid her domestic (i.e., cleaning) role — enables a reset that saves everyone and fills the heavens with flower wallpaper. Her projection of Interior Design is better than his ostensibly Intelligent.In playing this theology against the context of a family sit-com (where the omniscient Father hardly knows best), the film's essential assumption is that the first wave of Christianity has failed us. Jehovah's wars and frustrations have thwarted the Son's lessons of peace and harmony. Ea's initial revolt is to release to the world everyone's date of death. With that new and most forbidden knowledge, people lose their dependency upon God. No longer having to please him, they are prompted to redefine their lives and themselves. Each of Ea's six new apostles represents a different form of self-discovery and humanizing. The last apostle actually converts from boy to girl.The most evocative is the matured beauty Catherine Deneuve who escapes her cold tyrant husband first with a rent boy and then, more rewardingly, with a loving gorilla. In Ea's new regime the most savage is turned into loving and the cold Christian "civility" is overthrown. Similarly another woman's insentient prosthetic arm becomes her bond with her new lover, whom her love converts from killer. In a reversal of the Eden myth, another man is led out of his self-restriction in a city park to the antithetic freedom of the Arctic. No longer at two with nature, he's led there by a flock of birds he can choreograph into visual patterns. The film's first and essential joke is that in this theology Creation happened in modern Brussels. But far from a radical idea, that revives an essential tenet of Christianity: the eternal and pervasive presence of our divinity and our eternal battle with temptation and evil. Further, as man made God in his own image (though he arrogantly pretends the reverse), there's a certain logic in this God being a short-fused murderous and malicious abuser of women and children. That's the force we see dominating our globe.