THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

Yes — and if you haven't shown your family this one yet, the new restoration is the reason to start. Cecil B. DeMille's Moses epic is one of the four or five greatest biblical films ever made, carried by towering performances from Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, and by a script with real theological weight. Best of all, God, not Moses, is the hero of the story.

It isn't flawless. There are hokey stretches, some historical liberties, and a shaky performance from Anne Baxter as the Egyptian queen. But the parting of the Red Sea still holds up, the Egyptian sets are spectacular, and the restored color makes it all glow.

A few scenes are intense — a strangling, a plague that kills children, an army drowning — so this is one to watch with older kids and up, not toddlers. For everyone else: a family classic that still earns the word.

Pharaoh fears a Hebrew deliverer has been born, so newborn boys are sentenced to death. One mother sets her baby adrift on the Nile — and he's found and raised as Egyptian royalty, favored by Pharaoh Seti over his own son, Rameses. When Moses learns the truth of his Hebrew birth, he risks everything he has to walk among the slaves he came from. A single act of justice costs him his place in the palace and sends him into the desert — where God is not finished with him yet.

Four stars, and the film earns every one of them. Heston, Brynner, and Yvonne DeCarlo give performances with real command, and the rivalry between Moses and Rameses crackles even before their later, greater confrontation. DeMille's Egypt is enormous and gorgeous, and the restored Technicolor makes the huge sets look better than ever.

It isn't perfect craft: a couple of moments are hokey, Anne Baxter's queen is shakier than the rest of the cast, and the pillar of fire effect hasn't aged as gracefully as the parting of the Red Sea, which still astonishes. The film also takes some historical liberties with Moses's early life. None of that dents the whole. This is a brilliant, enduring achievement.

This is a film built on a very strong biblical, moral worldview, and it wears that conviction openly. God is the actual hero — not Moses, not spectacle, not romance. The film's most striking lines come straight from that conviction: Moses telling Joshua and Sephora that God "is not flesh but spirit, the light of eternal mind," and answering the call to arms with "It is not by the sword that He will deliver His people but by the staff of a shepherd." Few films let theology breathe like that.

DeMille frames the whole story, in his own opening remarks, as a battle over whether people belong to God or to the state — a strong pro-liberty, anti-statist message that reflects the American values of its era as much as it does Exodus. That framing gives the film real force: freedom is not just political here, it's covenantal, rooted in the idea that people are "free souls under God."

The film also doesn't flinch from naming slavery and racism as evils — and it rebukes them rather than excusing them. This is a story about a deliverer sent to a captive people, and the ache it dramatizes is one Scripture answers directly: "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free" (Galatians 5:1).

Some films age. This one endures. DeMille gave the world a biblical epic with real theological courage, anchored by performances that still hold up nearly seventy years later — and he never lost sight of who the story is really about. Our verdict stands as it opened: worth the trip — older children and adults. Gather the family, dim the lights, and let this one remind you Whose story it always was.