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Solidly crafted and intelligently inspiring, “Beautifully Broken” skillfully entwines three narratives about faith, forgiveness, and fortuitous interconnections in a drama that likely will receive a warm reception from audiences with a taste for evangelical entertainment. Director Eric Welch and his co-writers attempt a tricky balancing act here, comparing and contrasting the struggles of two African families affected by the 1994 Rwandan Genocide with crises that disrupt a well-to-do white family in Nashville. To their considerable credit, the filmmakers avoid virtually all of the clichés common to formulaic stories of “white saviors” and “magical Negroes” while treating their characters, and their audience, with due respect.

The movie begins during the early days of the Rwandan Genocide, as murderous bands of gun- and machete-wielding Hutu militia hunt and slaughter their Tutsi neighbors and co-workers. William Mwizerwa (Benjamin A. Onyango), a devoutly religious Tutsi manager at a coffee export firm, barely avoids being added...

Essentially the “Why We Fight” series for The War on Christmas, the “God’s Not Dead” franchise has — with its first two installments — asserted itself as the chintziest and most intellectually counterfeit branch of the lucrative faith-based film wave that it’s helped to define. Whereas other recent offerings like “Heaven Is for Real” and last week’s “I Can Only Imagine” are largely harmless in how they preach to the choir and prostrate themselves before Evangelical audiences, Pure Flix’s “God’s Not Dead” saga has been defined by a persecution complex large enough to crucify Christ the Redeemer.

These movies are fundamentalist propaganda aimed at people who are convinced their religion is under attack in this country just because it doesn’t exempt them from the Constitution. At a time when antisemitic hate crimes are on the rise and America is openly hostile towards its own Muslim community...

Even in these polarizing times, it’s not every faith-based drama that gets a title as stark in its certainty as “God’s Not Dead.” That movie, a specialty hit in 2014, and its notably less successful sequel, “God’s Not Dead 2” (can we all agree that the incandescent nature of the Almighty doesn’t exactly find poetic expression in the title “God’s Not Dead 2”?), both had a disputatious chip on their shoulder. They were dramas about the victimization of contemporary Christians, and they were righteously gauzy and a tad hectoring. They mounted strenuous arguments against the arguments against faith.

The first sign that “God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness” has a more inviting tone, that it’s still preaching to the choir but in a kinder, gentler way, is that it isn’t called “God’s Not Dead 3: Do You Believe Us Yet?” The third film in the series is set,...