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Dogma Is Still the Best Movie Kevin Smith Ever Made

Sure, it’s chatty, casual, inelegant, and doesn’t make much sense. But it’s also sincere, charming, and extremely funny.

Smith has gone on to make plenty more movies — ranging from for-hire studio-action flicks to mainstream comedies to Clerks sequels to whatever the hell Tusk was — and he’s become his own lucrative multimedia brand, but the hilarious Dogma still stands as a cinematic high point in his career, the moment when his type of filmmaking made the most sense. Whipsawing between profane irreverence and spiritual earnestness, the chatty comedy about two fallen angels, Bartleby and Loki (Affleck and Damon), seeking to reenter Heaven by utilizing a loophole in divine law has a precocious imagine-if energy. So other heavenly messengers try to convince a semi-lapsed Catholic named Bethany Sloane (Linda Fiorentino), who volunteers at an abortion clinic, to travel to New Jersey to stop the duo; she’s been given the task because she also happens to be “the great-great-great- great-great-grand-niece of Jesus Christ.”

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