The Shack

"A Hallmark-card therapy session, a kind of woodland weekend-retreat self-actualisation seminar hosted by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."

"For a faith-based film that aims to promote spiritual healing and prescribe forgiveness, The Shack is almost unforgivably joyless and visually bland."

"As the film passes the two-hour mark, it begins to feel as if it's treading water. People of faith already know that there are no cut-and-dried answers to the kinds of questions Mack is asking."

"The equivalent of a Nicholas Sparks tale for those spiritually inclined."

"Even its jolts of surrealism feel curiously stilted; what it needed was a director whose reverence would be tempered by a healthy sense of the ludicrous, an ability to tap into and draw out the material's stranger undercurrents."

"However universal the perennial questions and struggles that The Shack illuminates, under Stuart Hazeldine's plodding direction, its faith-based brand of self-help feels like being trapped in someone else's spiritual retreat - in real time."