Easter weekend has become secular enough over the past few decades where many Americans use the holiday weekend to go to the movies.

It’s a trend that started with the summer blockbuster during the Fourth of July holiday and subsequently by Hollywood with premieres on Christmas Day. While COVID-19 put some of that on hold as audiences streamed movies at home, it seems to be making a comeback with the easing of the pandemic.

The gently gay-friendly Fantastic Beasts: The Secret of Dumbledore won the box office this past weekend, while the religiously-inspired film Father Stu finished a respectable fifth. It wasn’t a bad finish for a film that doesn’t feature a Marvel superhero and may find an audience in Western-rite Christians who were otherwise at church and with family this past Sunday.

Of course, this is a film that features a superhero of a different kind.

Father Stu is the true story of Stuart Long, an amateur boxer who eventually moves to Los Angeles in order to pursue an acting career and along that journey he becomes a Catholic priest. That’s the simplest way to put it without giving away too much of the plot for those who are planning to see it in the coming days.

The two-hour film, featuring Mark Wahlberg as the main character, gets a Rotten Tomatoes score of 45% based on 75 reviews by critics, but a 95% from verified users from the general audience. It shouldn’t surprise me that there is a divergence between media-market critics and the audience when it comes to movies that glorify faith. I found the story compelling, despite the vulgar language, but it is worth seeing.

I get that reviewers are entitled to their opinions. After all, that’s the job of a critic. But the coverage around the film, however, has been framed in a certain way, offering up lopsided and negative takes among many mainstream news sites.

This isn’t a traditional news-coverage question, but it’s appropriate to ask: What’s going on here?