Film

The Apostle

Name: The Apostle
Genre: Drama
Released: 1997
Cast: Robert Duvall, Farrah Fawcett, Miranda Richardson, John Beasley, Walton Goggins

Robert Duvall's decades-long passion project: he wrote, directed, and stars as Sonny Dewey, a Pentecostal preacher who commits a violent act and flees into anonymity, rebuilding a ministry from nothing in small-town Louisiana. It's sweaty, slow, and unshowy, more interested in genuine tent-revival ecstasy than judgment. Watch it for the texture of American faith and for a performance that never once winks at the camera.

TMDb rating

6.3

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Billy Bob Thornton (who shows up in The Apostle too) directs and stars as a man freshly released from institutional care, trying to build a decent life despite his own violent past.

But Thornton's slow, halting drawl and the film's bleak Arkansas setting can feel suffocating rather than soulful.

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Duvall again, decades later, playing a hermit staging his own funeral to force a confrontation with a long-buried sin — a quieter, wryer cousin to Sonny's reckoning with guilt.

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