Matthew Modine returns to Abel Ferrara’s cinema after his tortured turn as cocaine/Beatrice Dalle-obsessed movie star in The Blackout, this time as the director of a controversial film about the final days of Jesus and his relationship with Mary Magdalene. Typically, the narrative unfolds in two cities: in Jerusalem, where Modine’s lead actress, Marie (an ambiguous performance from Juliette Binoche), has retreated with her newfound discovery of spirituality, and in New York City, where Modine’s film’s premiere is being covered by the spiritually-challenged and unravelling Ted Younger’s (Forest Whitaker) TV show. Ferrara’s is a film of overlapping identities that shift gracefully between the various screens, of an intrinsically Ferrara-ian meta-ness of dissolving images held by recurring obsessions with filmmaking, spirituality, and fidelity, and of sublime tonal inconsistencies held in naked embrace, ironically making the film a truly spiritual investigation into faith and morality.—Mubarak Ali