should i fall from grace here with you?

And the critics start speaking out on Gibson's The Passion of the Christ:

First reviews of Mel Gibson's controversial new film on the last 12 hours of Jesus's life, "The Passion of the Christ," indicated on Monday that it will be a film debated for years to come with critics deeply and passionately split over whether the intense violence of the movie is redemptive or destructive to Christianity's message of peace and brotherly love.

"One of the cruelest movies in the history of cinema," says the New Yorker's David Denby in a negative review that also calls the film "a sickening death trip, a grimly unilluminated procession of treachery, beatings, blood and agony."

Critic Denby adds, 'For two hours ... we watch, stupefied as a handsome, strapping, at times half-naked young man is slowly tortured to death. Gibson is thoroughly fixated on the scourging and crushing of Christ and is so meagerly involved in the spiritual meanings of the final hours, that he falls in danger of altering Jesus's message of love into one of hate."

However, Roger Ebert seems to have liked the film:

"It is also gravely intense and the work of a man as deeply committed to his subject as one could hope for or, for that matter, want...., that really seems to deal with what actually happened," said Ebert.

So it begins...