Plugged In Magazine Website (Focus on the Family)

This is a resource I've known about since I was in high school and I thought I'd share it.

Plugged In magazine is published by Focus on the Family and is aimed at teenagers. I don't get the magazine anymore, but their movie reviews are unlike any other. Yahoo or Rotten Tomatoes will provide critic or user reviews, but Plugged In goes much further and with a spiritual eye. There is a regular-sort of review to open, but they move on to other categories of review which are: positive elements, spiritual content, sexual content, violent content, crude or profane language, drug and alcohol content, and "other negative elements", followed up with a conclusion.

Personally, I enjoy this amount of detailed deconstruction because it allows me to consider the movie based on one or more of these factors because, for instance, I may not care too much about the amount of violence. The best part about these reviews is that they are usually quite objective. The review may review a particularly "bad" movie, which has loads of sexual, violent, and profane material, but in the conclusion the reviewer(s) will not weigh in on whether or not one should view the movie. (I can't promise the review won't lean one way or the other, all reviews do, but I'm saying they won't [often] come out and say "Don't watch this" or guilt you into passing.)

Plugged In Online

Sample Plugged In review: "Book of Eli" starring Denzel Washington and Mila Kunis