For the most part the Rotten Tomatoes score for a movie is a reasonably good heuristic for quality. In terms of my own tastes, if it scores really high on both critic and user rating it’s typically a solid film. There are of some biases of course. IMHO movies in the older canon have inflated RT ratings, movies dealing with social issues have inflated critic, but not user, ratings–and conversely movies that come down on the “wrong side” of a social issue (basically any Dave Chapelle piece) have artificially deflated critic ratings. Finally, starchy formulaic movies often have inflated user, but not critic, ratings. 

These carve-outs notwithstanding, however, I’ve found that simply adding the critic and user scores together correlates pretty strongly with how good I think a movie is as long as there are enough ratings to give it a large enough sample size. 

So I went ahead and looked up the RT scores for the different “Mormon cinema” works. I largely drew on this page. However, it omitted some of the really big heavy hitters that, while addressing Mormon themes, characters, and settings, are not traditionally considered to be part of “Mormon cinema,” (e.g. Angels in America and America Primeval) probably because they weren’t made by people with a Latter-day Saint background, or don’t have a genetic relationship to the regional Utah movement that can be traced to Dutcher’s earlier work. Nonetheless, they still address Mormon themes heavily enough that I’m including them. I’m not including movies that only have user ratings; they have to be well-known enough to have elicited at least some critic ratings. Not that some of these aren’t good (e.g. I’ve heard 17 Miracles is decent), but it’s just harder to compare.

So with that, below are Mormon cinema films rank-ordered according to this methodology. 

It places New York Doll and God’s Army: States of Grace as the top Mormon-made films, which makes sense to me. States of Grace is a relatively unknown gem. I haven’t seen New York Doll, but it sounds like a very moving film, and I am putting it on my to-watch list. Angels in America is higher unsurprisingly, as it’s a darling of particular New York drama/cinephile types (and no, not every invocation of “New York types” is a Jew reference), and it is good, but I actually think States of Grace is better. 

Of course my methodology completely breaks down with Under the Banner of Heaven (my earlier review here). I’m fine with Hollywoodization as long their admit that they are Hollywoodizing it (e.g. the producer of American Primeval), but I just can’t stomach it when they claim that they are being scrupulous with historical and cultural accuracy but have Brigham Young and Emma Smith conspiring to kill Joseph, a Stake President lauding Native American allyship in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and dozens of other lol moments. They somehow landed a couple A-listers, and that’s just about it. 

The rest of the rank orderings generally make sense, although I’d place Brigham City higher, Big Love above The Best Two Years, and I have yet to see Wagon Master or Heretic (I hadn’t heard of Wagon Master before doing this); I also haven’t seen any of the lower-ranked ones, but I’m not inclined to spend the time to.