POLICE STATE (2023)

Here's the decision. Dinesh D'Souza has built a serious, forceful documentary arguing that Democrat Party leaders, working with top bureaucrats in the FBI, CIA and Department of Justice, are using federal police power to censor and even jail their political opponents. Whatever your politics, the movie marshals real eyewitnesses — whistleblowers, a congressman, a senator, and ordinary citizens caught in the machinery — to make its case, and it makes it with conviction.

The content is mild by documentary standards: four light obscenities and profanities, brief Holocaust footage, and passing verbal references to pornographic material in schools and to child sex trafficking at the southern border. That's enough to warrant caution for older children, but nothing here is graphic.

So: if you're an older child watching with a parent, or an adult who wants to weigh D'Souza's argument for yourself, this is worth your time — just know it runs about ten minutes too long and drags toward the end.

POLICE STATE opens with historical footage of one-party police states — Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Mao's China — before turning its lens on the modern United States.

From there, D'Souza narrates and interviews his way through his central claim: that federal agencies have been turned against Trump, his family, his loyalists, Republicans, conservatives, pro-life Christian leaders, and even parents who speak up at local school board meetings. He talks with experts, reporters, whistleblowers, and the everyday people who say they were targeted. Whether he proves it is for you to decide.

Three stars, and here's what they mean. POLICE STATE builds a powerful, well-sourced argument using eyewitness testimony from current and former government officials and from citizens who say the FBI and Department of Justice harassed them. Dramatic re-enactments of FBI raids — led by a menacing agent played by Nick Searcy — give the film teeth, and D'Souza's conversations with Dan Bongino, a former police officer and Secret Service agent, anchor it.

The flaw is pacing. The movie runs about ten minutes too long, and the ending drags as it works through the school-board and pro-life segments. The single most affecting moment — an interview with an elderly man unjustly targeted for being outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021 — might have made a stronger ending than the one D'Souza chose. Even so, the film lands its case.

POLICE STATE carries a very strong moral, conservative worldview. It exalts liberty and opposes big government and the socialist and communist forms of tyranny that produce a massive police state. That instinct — that unchecked earthly power corrupts and consumes — is one Scripture shares.

The film's method is accusation and evidence: D'Souza names Presidents Obama, Biden and even Trump-era officials, and argues that the news media, Big Tech and wealthy donors have all aided the drift toward one-party rule. Its heart is with the ordinary people it says were crushed by that power — the acquitted pro-life activist, the mothers targeted after school-board meetings, the elderly man swept up over January 6. The film's outrage on their behalf is its moral center.

This is a polemic, and it argues from one side with confidence. Viewers who want a fuller picture will find themselves wishing for the counter-voices the film doesn't include. Weigh the argument as you will.

Underneath the politics runs an old warning. When Israel demanded a king, God told them exactly what centralized human power would cost them — their sons, their daughters, their fields, their freedom — "and in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day" (1 Samuel 8:18). The film's fear of tyranny is a fear as old as Scripture.

D'Souza has made a forceful, well-argued documentary with a moral spine — a warning about power, dressed up as urgent testimony, and slowed only by an ending that lingers too long. For older children watching with a parent and for adults ready to weigh the claims themselves, it's worth watching — ages 10 and up.