“The Apostle.” Written and directed by Robert Duvall. Running time: 133 minutes. Rated R (for mild language and violence). Nightly, Feb. 23-March 5, Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville.

Forty minutes into “The Apostle,” Sonny Dewey (Robert Duvall), a Pentecostal preacher in rural Texas, has a premonition. He leaves the motel at which he’s staying, drives across town and swings into a dark driveway, where he turns a loaded pistol over in his hands and contemplates the house before him.

In that house are his wife, Jessie (Farrah Fawcett), and her lover, Horace (Todd Allen), a man half Sonny’s age who happens to be a youth minister. Trembling with rage, Sonny looks long and hard at that house before putting the gun down on the dashboard and whispering four angry words: “Thou shalt not kill.”

Perhaps not, but God said nothing about hurling a baseball through a bedroom window, which Sonny does with startling fierceness before going home to beg the Lord for strength, guidance and peace, none of which takes hold. Next day, Sonny emerges drunk at a Little League baseball game, where he grabs his wife by the hair, terrorizes his children and takes a baseball bat to Horace’s head. All of this from a man who preaches peace and love to his disciples? Unfortunately, yes. You see, Sonny may have passed himself off to the townspeople as God’s bright and shining messenger, but to us he has slowly revealed himself as a manipulative, brawling con artist who loves a good fight every bit as much as he loves doing God’s work.

“The Apostle” is an excellent film. Beautifully written, directed and acted by Duvall (who used his own money to get it made and now finds himself and his picture nominated for Academy Awards), it is spellbinding in its mission to expose the complicated truth about evangelism, which, according to this film, is corrupted.

By whom? As Duvall sees it, a group of disenfranchised, uneducated individuals who can’t possibly live up to their own ideals or standards, and thus must always fail. These people want to serve God, but, as Sonny and Jessie demonstrate so well, they are willing to do so only if serving God also serves them.

For instance, when Sonny learns that Horace is near death, he doesn’t turn himself in to the police as a good Christian would do. Instead, he freely breaks the law (and a few commandments) by pushing his car into a pond, destroying his identification, busting out of town, changing his name to The Apostle, E.F., and starting a new church in Bayou Boutte, La., with a retired black minister named Brother Blackwell (John Beasely).

In spite of all this, it is not Duvall’s intention to portray Sonny as an evil man, which he isn’t. There is, in fact, a great deal of good in Sonny. Through his powerful and vastly entertaining preaching, he pulls depressed people out of their torpor by breathing new hope into their lives. He storms into this backwater of a town and makes the quest for Jesus perhaps the most exciting adventure these townspeople will ever know. He may not be able to follow his own preaching, but he is touching people who are becoming better individuals because of it. Too bad it all comes crashing down around him.

Grade: A

Video to avoid

“Mad City.” Directed by Costa-Gavras. Written by Tom Matthews. Running time: 120 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for violence and some language).

When dim-witted museum security guard Sam (John Travolta) is fired from his job, he brings a loaded shotgun and a bag full of dynamite to the museum in an effort to get his boss’s attention. It works, but only after Sam fires the shotgun and inadvertently shoots another guard in the chest.

Enter down-on-his-luck reporter Bracket (Dustin Hoffman), who happens to be in the bathroom when the shot goes off, and who quickly turns these events into a media circus in an effort to further his own career and to get him back on network news with his rival, a news anchor named Hollander (Alan Alda).

Hoffman and Alda are good here, but Travolta is woefully miscast as a blubbering, bumbling idiot who manages to sink this film with third-rate acting that exposes the script’s many holes. “Mad City” is supposed to be about sensational journalism and how the media, in their rush for the next big story, turns relatively minor events into global events. All this is timely stuff, but the film doesn’t pull it off nearly as well as Billy Wilder did in 1951’s biting satire, “Ace in the Hole” (since retitled “The Big Carnival”), which starred Kirk Douglas as an embittered newsman who tells the sensational story of a man trapped in a cave. If this is the kind of fare you’re seeking, don’t rent “Mad City.” Instead, see Wilder’s film or simply tune in to the nightly news.

Grade: C-

Christopher Smith, a writer and critic who lives in Brewer, reviews films each Monday in the NEWS.