{"id":832755,"date":"2026-11-12T23:48:12","date_gmt":"2026-11-12T23:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/832755\/"},"modified":"2026-11-12T23:48:12","modified_gmt":"2026-11-12T23:48:12","slug":"ben-shapiros-new-film-is-more-sermon-than-cinema","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/832755\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Shapiro\u2019s new film is more sermon than cinema"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month, Ben Shapiro announced<\/a> a new front in the cinematic culture wars. \u201cNetflix is bringing out a David Bowie-inspired, Led Zeppelin-scored glam rock version of CS Lewis\u2019 Narnia, with a female-voiced Aslan,\u201d he posted. \u201cEmptying out core Western IP of all meaning and content\u2026 that\u2019s what we\u2019re fighting again. And with our new movie, Confession, we\u2019re winning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, he\u2019s certainly right about the contrast. Against the queer-coded maximalism of the Narnia trailer, Confession offers the polar opposite: a handful of rooms in a Soviet prison, barely any light, and enough solemnity to shatter a disco ball. It is straight, leaden, and dreary, with so much dialog about Russian literature that \u2014 sorry \u2014 you\u2019re the one getting crime and punishment.<\/p>\n

Confession debuted on Wednesday night on the Daily Wire\u2019s streaming service and, for one evening only, in 100 cinemas, open exclusively to paying members of the company. It is the conservative media outfit\u2019s bid to prove that the Right can make art instead of merely whining about it. The coup is the cast: Rob Lowe, James Franco, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nick Nolte. Real actors!<\/p>\n

Shapiro penned the screenplay and claimed to have finished it in four days. This fact is presented as evidence of his prodigious abilities, but after viewing this film it accidentally sounds like a confession of its own. Having secured the actors and a prestigious director, V\u00e1clav Marhoul, perhaps somebody should have secured a rewrite.<\/p>\n

The story takes us to Moscow in 1938. Lowe plays Alexei, a former literature professor arrested and hauled into the Lubyanka prison. His interrogator turns out to be Vladimir (Franco), once his prize student and now a lieutenant of state security. Vladimir wants a signed confession denouncing a dissident priest. Alexei, who has made a recent conversion to Christianity, won\u2019t give him one. For 132 minutes, they argue about God, Lenin, and Dostoevsky, with intermissions for beatings, philosophical chats with cellmates, and a visit from a bitter ex-wife.<\/p>\n

It progresses like an expensive version of a one-act play about the horrors of Stalinism, staffed by familiar \u2014 and miscast \u2014 Gen-X and Boomer faces. Lowe, forever the sunny bureaucrat of Parks and Recreation, squints behind wire spectacles and speaks in a reedy voice that makes him sound much older than he actually is. Nobody attempts a Russian accent; one cast member admitted that he\u2019d spent weeks and \u201ca lot of money\u201d perfecting one before his agent broke the news that no one else was bothering. And so when Franco, in his flat California cadence, bellows \u201cMonsters change history!\u201d, it is unintentionally hilarious.<\/p>\n

There is a stirring message about forgiveness and redemption here; and to Shapiro\u2019s credit, he gives his villain actual arguments. But it\u2019s all buried in stilted, amateurish dialog. Franco\u2019s Vladimir, a mouthpiece for the Stalinist Soviet state, is burdened with lines like \u201cWe have camps specializing in the trafficking in the opiate of the masses\u201d \u2014 a nudge in the ribs for anyone who has heard of Karl Marx. And lest you don\u2019t get the movie\u2019s message that communism is bad, there is graffiti scrawled on the walls of a prison cell that is translated for the viewer as: Workers of the World, Shit!<\/p>\n

The strange part is that Confession is competent-ish. It was shot on 35mm by Marhoul, the Czech director of The Painted Bird, and it apes prestige cinema just closely enough to land in the uncanny valley: the shadows, the grain and the Oscar nominees are all present, and all slightly off.<\/p>\n

At one point in the Daily Wire\u2019s live chat accompanying the screening, a viewer complained the movie was tedious, and Shapiro himself responded: \u201cIt turns out prison is\u2026 slow.\u201d It\u2019s never a good sign to compare your piece of streaming entertainment to an actual gulag. So while, yes, Netflix may well be emptying C.S. Lewis\u2019s Narnia of meaning and content, Confession has the reverse problem: it is all meaning and content, and no movie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last month, Ben Shapiro announced a new front in the cinematic culture wars. \u201cNetflix is bringing out a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":832756,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[63005,69429,179035,96,200702,2839,69793,31818,56,1955,54,55],"class_list":["post-832755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ben-shapiro","tag-confession","tag-daily-wire","tag-entertainment","tag-james-franco","tag-movies","tag-narnia","tag-rob-lowe","tag-uk","tag-uncategorized","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=832755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/832756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=832755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=832755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=832755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}