Metacritic reviews

No genre gesture goes untapped in the deliberately hagiographic “Mary,” a coming-of-age saga about the mother of Jesus. Directed by D.J. Caruso and written by Timothy Michael Hayes, the film aims to draw multitudes.

Alas, you have to sit through a lot of turgid Bible studies dramatisations of bits of scripture to get to the good stuff.

There’s sacrifice, but little compassion and little sense of the allure of the origin story that launched a global religion. This account from an “elevated historical” space has action, but the drama in the story is mostly dull pre-ordained “prophecy,” as if that’s enough.

Overall, the biggest takeaway that I had while watching Mary is that it was a missed opportunity. A missed opportunity to give the mother of Jesus more development than we've seen in prior depictions of the Nativity story, and a missed opportunity to truly show the cruelty of Herod's actions as a ruler.

Mary is a fictionalized and heavily dramatized account of the life of the Virgin Mary, but the movie’s great and only pleasure is in watching Anthony Hopkins play King Herod as a homicidal maniac.

This may be the single worst film I’ve seen all year; it’s certainly the most confused.