Oh My God (2009)

Critic Reviews

• Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune

  A mashup of slick tourist photos, a cacophony of contradictory sound bites yielding zero insight. Watching this disorganized essay on organized religion may actually make you stupider.

• Walter V. Addiego, San Francisco Chronicle

  Some of the talking heads say entertaining or thoughtful things and some of the locations are quite exotic. But does this justify 98 minutes of screen time?

• Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

  Peter Rodger does a fairly comprehensive job of traversing the globe in 98 minutes, posing the age-old question, "What is God?"

• Stephen Holden, New York Times

  [A] picturesque but shallow inquiry into the meaning of God.

• Lou Lumenick, New York Post

  Hearing snoring from behind me at a screening the other day, I looked around and noticed four people had dozed off during the prettily photographed, boring vanity project that is Oh My God?

• Justin Chang, Variety

  Compacts nearly three years' worth of globe-trotting interviews into an often visually vibrant but rhetorically muddled package.

• Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  At its best, Oh My God strikes a long-forgotten chord that seems to sing: All you need is love. (And Ringo Starr shows up to underscore the point.)

• Chris Hewitt (St. Paul), St. Paul Pioneer Press

  Oh My God is a documentary in the Michael Moore/essay mold, and by "Michael Moore/essay" I mean "annoying blowhard who will not shut up."

• Alissa Wilkinson, Christianity Today

  There's nothing new unearthed in this film. The religious adherent won't have their mind changed, and the person who isn't sure what they believe won't find any help here, either.

• Avi Offer, NYC Movie Guru

  Provocative, captivating and profoundly illuminating. You'll be talking about it for weeks.

• Fr. Chris Carpenter, Movie Dearest

  One reaches the conclusion fairly early in Rodger's gorgeously photographed but obnoxiously quick-cut-edited film that the question "What is God?" has no satisfactory nor universally agreeable answers.

• Daniel Eagan, Film Journal International

  Scattershot documentary about the meaning of God won't win any converts.

• Steve Ramos, Boxoffice Magazine

  While beautiful photography of the faraway lands Rodger visits and crisp editing keep the movie flowing at a fast pace, Oh My God remains a hit-and-miss collection of interviews that fail to create a single, compelling message.

• Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice

  A gorgeously filmed documentary that takes us to 23 countries and conveys the diverse paths to God in the world's major religions.

• Matt Pais, Metromix.com

  The one thing many people seem to agree on is that whatever they feel for God, they can't really explain it. How revealing.

• Kevin Lee, Time Out New York

  The musings of celebrities like Seal and Ringo Starr are given prominence over those of religious leaders and scholars, while a relentless Moby-esque soundtrack subsumes each insight into a sonic miasma of theism.

• Andrew Schenker, Slant Magazine

  In Oh My God, those who disagree with the party line are summarily contradicted.

Read all 17 critic reviews