I’ve never played Minecraft in my life—but then I’m not a Christian, either, and have always delighted in the distinctly Mormon cinematic universe of Jared Hess, the director of “A Minecraft Movie.” He’s best known for “Napoleon Dynamite,” from 2004, which evokes its spiritual milieu only implicitly, by the absence of secular pop culture and of teen-age ribaldry. He followed it with “Nacho Libre,” starring Jack Black as a friar who enters the wrestling ring to save a convent, and, in 2009, with “Gentlemen Broncos,” a celestial gross-out vision of an adolescent gospel. His satire “Don Verdean,” from 2015, is explicitly set in church communities and involves relic smuggling in Israel; his 2016 comedy, “Masterminds,” is a heist film that’s centered on grace and holy innocence.
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