SELFIE DAD

Here's the short version: this is a comedy that actually makes you laugh, and it has something to say. Ben Marcus, a burned-out reality-TV editor and former standup comic, gets an unexpected shot at internet fame — and the film uses that ride to dig into fear, fatherhood, and a family quietly falling apart.

The humor lands. Reviewers compared it to the Golden Age of comedy — Bob Hope, Abbott and Costello — and some scenes are the funniest you'll find in a faith-based film this year. Other scenes are surprisingly moving. The plot does take a while to find its shape; the story doesn't fully click until a rival character is introduced partway through. But the payoff is a genuinely powerful ending.

There's essentially nothing here to caution families about — no language, no violence, no sex or nudity, just some background drinking at a party. If you want a movie night that's funny, clean, and unashamed about faith, this one delivers.

Ben Marcus once did standup. Now he edits reality TV, bored, disengaged, and quietly haunted by his father — a successful comedian whose affairs destroyed his family. When Ben's son discovers a video Ben never meant to post, it goes viral overnight. Sudden internet fame promises Ben everything he thought he wanted. But old wounds don't stay buried just because the audience is cheering.

Three stars means this one earns real laughs and real feeling, even if it takes its time getting there. The comedy is the standout — old-school, well-timed, and rare for a faith-based film, which makes the humor itself part of the film's case for itself. The emotional scenes land too, poignant enough to bring some audiences to tears.

The weak spot is structure: the story doesn't fully cohere until a rival character is introduced fairly late, and until then the film runs on charm more than momentum. Once the stakes arrive, though, the pieces come together into an ending strong enough to justify the wait.

This is a film unafraid to name its source of hope. It doesn't just gesture at faith — it puts the Bible, prayer, and Jesus front and center, with several direct statements that He is the only way. Church worship scenes, a discipleship relationship between two men centered on Scripture, and a wife learning how to pray for her husband all point the same direction: real change comes from God, not self-help or fame.

The film also takes honest aim at generational sin — a father's infidelity poisoning a son's fear of intimacy and family — and it resolves that wound through faith rather than therapy-speak or denial. Honesty, forgiveness, and love are treated as the fruit of turning to God, not abstract virtues floating free of Him.

There's nothing here to push back against theologically; the concerns are craft, not conviction. The film's deepest ache — a man afraid to become his father, anxious and disengaged until he finally opens a Bible — finds its answer in Scripture's own promise: "I sought the Lord, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears" (Psalm 34:4).

Selfie Dad earns its laughs the old-fashioned way and its emotion the honest way, wrapping both around a story about a father finally opening his Bible. It's a little slow to find its plot, but the payoff is real, and there's nothing in it a family needs to brace for. Worth the trip.