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I am not at all religious. But I do despair that so many people — both in my home country of the United States and my adopted land of the United Kingdom — profess to be Christian and claim these nations themselves are fueled by Christian values, and yet absolutely stomp, individually and collectively, on the ideals that Jesus preached. Particularly when it comes to looking after the poor, the downtrodden, and the marginalized.

So it’s especially nice, on this Easter Sunday, to see such a lovely, gentle film as Theirs Is the Kingdom, one of the very few movies I’ve ever seen that evinces even a passing religiosity that Jesus himself might approve of.

Study for the fresco of a man called Blue.

Asheville, North Carolina, is a hip, artsy, gentrifying college town surrounded by, as someone notes here, “real Appalachian poverty.” This small city, this place of harsh...