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Letters to God
Metascore
31 out of 100

Generally unfavorable - based on 7 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 0 out of 7
  2. Mixed: 4 out of 7
  3. Negative: 3 out of 7
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  1. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    58
    A bland, pious yet touching faith-based tearjerker.
  2. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Eric Hynes
    50
    With little in the way of story or spectacle to offer nonbelievers, the film itself just preaches to the choir.
  3. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Neil Genzlinger
    50
    Mr. Johnson and Ms. Lively are both pretty good, and with a more nuanced approach could have made this a powerful film.
  4. Variety
    Reviewed by: Justin Chang
    40
    While only the converted will likely see the redemption behind the manipulation, picture delivers a strong enough dose of spiritual saccharine to yield solid if not heavenly returns from its trusty target audience.
  5. Orlando Sentinel
    Reviewed by: Roger Moore
    38
    Good looking (it was filmed in Winter Garden) but slow and bland, this faith-based tear-jerker is a depressingly unemotional affair, with writing and some of the acting so flat that even its emotionally loaded situations can't inspire waterworks.
  6. Boxoffice Magazine
    Reviewed by: Pete Hammond
    30
    Letters to God is far too simplistic and pandering to find success outside of the targeted church-going family moviegoers it's hoping to reach.
  7. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marjorie Baumgarten
    0
    I've seen sick kids exploited for all sorts of reasons – usually as easy ploys to manipulate emotions but sometimes to sell things or encourage philanthropic outpourings – but Letters to God takes the cake (make that the holy wafer).
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User Reviews

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User Score
4.8 out of 10

Mixed or average reviews- based on 25 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 11
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 11
  3. Negative: 3 out of 11
  1. ChadS
    3
    To me, there's more spirituality coursing through the celluloid of Robert Bresson's "Au hasard Balthazar" than this Christian recruitment tool for people who love God, not movies. To me, there's more signs of God in the titular donkey than the church where Brady(Jeffrey Johnson), an alcoholic mailman, finds redemption after a DUI arrest with his son present in the stopped vehicle. But to its credit, "Letters to God" does include a scene in which infidels can relate to, because finally, somebody makes sense. Maddie(Robin Lively), the mother of a young boy stricken with brain cancer, tells her own mom, "Stop quoting the Bible to me. It's not curing my son." She disagrees with God's will, so for a little while, in a loaded film which preaches to the converted, "Letters to God" becomes accesible to those who believe that having faith is "religilous". In her darkest hour, when Maddie can no longer pretend that supplication has the power to repel the cancer cells from ravaging her son Tyler(Tanner Maguire), Olivia(Maree Cheatham), instead of talking like a grown-up, offers her daughter platitudes, a stock choice of words that confronts the matter at hand with magic. (Like Sarah Silverman says, "Jesus is magic!") This mother's flare-up creates a slight rupture in the Christian-based rhetoric of the filmic text, which, incidentally, is the film's only sane moment because "Letters to God" sees tragedy with rose-tinted glasses. Because Tyler drinks the ideological kool-aid, he sees a newly-born baby as being his replacement. In the bedroom, Maddie tells her son otherwise, that he can't be supplanted, but this is exactly what the movie intimates, and believes. Earlier in the film, his best friend's grandfather tells the sick boy about how he was "handpicked by God" and "chosen for the role of a lifetime". "Dying is Fine", in a sense, because God's will and plan can't be cross-examined under the strictest sense of church dogma. But Tyler couldn't be faulted if he changed his mind about death, echoing the John Ryan Pike(of Ra Ra Riot) line: "You know that dying is fine, but maybe I wouldn't like death if death were good."… Full Review »
  2. DougV
    10
    This movie had great acting and the ability to show both the good and bad involved in the events. On the one hand you had those that faith in the healing. On the other hand you had those that were trying to focus on physical only. That is a common struggle in real life and they brought it out well here too.… Full Review »
  3. mandm1951
    1
    Oy Vey; we should have known better. My girlfriend (who is spiritual and somewhat religious) and I (an agnostic) rented this film because it was on sale but couldn't get through the whole thing. There is a group of (probably mostly church-going) people who will like -or love- this movie, but we found it preachy, pious, proselytizing, and all too predictable.… Full Review »
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