Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.

This hilarious satire should have megachurch pastors and their congregants shaking in their boots. Hopefully, it will also propel them to ask the kind of pertinent questions that many Black churches have been avoiding for decades. In the Black community, the church is a big deal, whether you attend or not. Either way, you seem to end up feeling caught in the pull the church has over the community. So Black viewers will probably feel extremely seen (and some might even feel vulnerable) while watching Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. It asks its viewers to examine the lies and hypocrisies that go on right under their noses in the church, including licentious preachers who condemn homosexuality above all sin, even though homosexuality was never actually condemned outright in the Bible. Plus there's the hypocrisy of the focus on money and power -- things that Jesus actually taught against coveting -- that defines the megachurch.

But the movie's most poignant message is also the most ignored one in church culture: the burden that women bear within church life. Hall expertly portrays Trinitie's stunted emotional growth. She's a woman who has been taught all her life that to be "good," she must suffer, usually at the whims of a man, especially if that man is her husband. Trinitie endures far more than she should, but because she's been raised to believe that a good Christian woman is one who's like Job, she tries her best to remain dutiful in the face of disrespect. Brown also excels in showcasing how a man like Lee-Curtis not only exists within the confines of the church but is exalted and coddled despite wrongdoing. Overall, if you want to gain insight into a particularly thorny part of Black American life -- or if you have lived experience with church culture and have been aching to see its problems on-screen -- Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. is the film for you.