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Journey to Bethlehem (2023)
A young woman carrying an unimaginable responsibility. A young man torn between love and honor. A jealous king who will stop at nothing to keep his crown.
rating 6/10 User rating 95 votes 77% ❄ Christmas Connection
Journey to Bethlehem is a direct retelling of the Nativity story, following Mary and Joseph from the Annunciation through the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. It is framed explicitly as a Christmas origin story, complete with the Star of Bethlehem, the Three Wise Men, and the manger. There is no more Christmassy premise than this.
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Our Review
There is a specific kind of audacity required to greenlight a pop musical about the birth of Jesus. Journey to Bethlehem, released by Sony's Affirm Films in November 2023, has that audacity in spades. The team behind it, director Adam Anders (executive music producer on all six seasons of Glee) and co-writer Peter Barsocchini (who wrote all three High School Musical films), essentially asked: what if the Nativity story had a contemporary pop soundtrack and a camp villain played by Antonio Banderas? The answer is a movie that is weird, occasionally moving, frequently clunky, and impossible to dismiss entirely.
Pop Songs for the Holiest Night
The concept is stranger than it sounds on paper. Anders does not simply drop modern pop songs over ancient Judea. He and Barsocchini constructed original songs in a contemporary pop idiom, then wove in recontextualized Christmas carols. "O Come All Ye Faithful" becomes a literal call to pilgrimage. "What Child Is This?" is sung by characters who are asking it as a sincere question, not a rhetorical one. The structural cleverness of this is real, even if the execution is uneven.
Fiona Palomo as Mary is the film's most consistent success. Her voice is clean and controlled, and she plays the role with a dignity that resists sentimentality without ever going cold. Milo Manheim as Joseph is less certain, struggling most in the early scenes where the script asks him to be a romantic lead before he becomes a faithful one. His voice is serviceable. His performance finds its footing by the second act.
Antonio Banderas Understood the Assignment
Banderas plays King Herod as a glittering, paranoid peacock who knows exactly what kind of movie he is in. He leans into the camp with obvious relish, delivering his villain songs with the commitment of a man who has nothing to prove and is having a genuinely good time. His scenes are the most purely entertaining in the film, which creates a structural problem: the villain is more fun to watch than the protagonists. This is not unusual in musicals, but it throws the Nativity's emotional weight off balance.
Joel David Smallbone plays Antipater, Herod's scheming son, and in real life Smallbone is a Christian musician (one half of For King & Country). His wife Moriah, also a Christian musician, plays Deborah, a supporting character. Their casting is not incidental. The film is explicitly faith-targeted, distributed through Affirm Films, Sony's Christian content label.
Filmed in Spain, Set in Ancient Judea
Production shot in Almeria, Andalusia, the same sun-baked desert province that has doubled for the Middle East in films since the 1960s. Lawrence of Arabia used it. Sergio Leone used it. Journey to Bethlehem joins a long tradition of filming ancient Judea on the Spanish coast. The Santa Barbara Castle in Alicante provides Herod's palace exteriors. The locations give the film a visual scale it could not have achieved on a comparable budget elsewhere.
The film opened on November 10, 2023, and earned $2.4 million domestically in its opening weekend, finishing seventh at the box office. Its total worldwide gross reached approximately $7.8 million. For a faith-targeted Christmas musical with no major franchise backing, that is a respectable performance. The audience CinemaScore was A-minus, which means the people who showed up liked it considerably more than many critics did.
What the Film Gets Right
The Nativity story is genuinely dramatic. A teenage girl told she will carry the son of God. Her fiance deciding whether to believe her or quietly end their engagement. A king who murders children because he fears a prophecy. These are not soft stories. Journey to Bethlehem does not entirely defang them. The scene where Joseph wrestles with whether to believe Mary is handled with more psychological weight than you might expect from a family-targeted pop musical.
The film also earns credit for its visual treatment of the Annunciation. The angel Gabriel appears without any of the kitsch that bedevils this particular scene in lesser productions. It is direct, lit well, and not overdone.
What it does not get right is consistency. Some songs land. Others feel like demo versions of better songs that got left in by accident. The pacing in the middle section drags. A few supporting performances read as undirected. These are real problems in a 97-minute film that cannot afford dead stretches.
Who This Is For
Journey to Bethlehem is made for families who want to watch a Christmas movie that takes the Nativity seriously as a story, not as background decoration. It is not made for people who find faith-themed entertainment alienating, and it makes no attempt to reach them. That clarity of purpose is, itself, a kind of artistic integrity. The film knows its audience and serves them. Banderas alone is worth the watch for anyone with a tolerance for theatrical villainy in period costume.
Fun Facts
Director Adam Anders spent years developing the project before it got made. His original announcement came in late 2020, when Deadline reported it under the working title "Road to Bethlehem."
Adam Anders was the executive music producer for all six seasons of Glee on Fox, producing every one of the show's 16 soundtrack albums and writing seven original songs for the series, including "Loser Like Me."
Co-writer Peter Barsocchini originally wrote the High School Musical script for his preteen daughter and her friends, even naming characters after them. The 2006 Disney Channel film became one of the most-watched cable broadcasts in history at the time.
Antonio Banderas, who plays King Herod, was 63 years old during production. He had previously survived a heart attack in January 2017 that he later said changed his perspective on life and work.
Joel David Smallbone (Antipater) and his wife Moriah (Deborah) both appear in the film. They are real-life Christian musicians: Joel is one half of the Grammy-winning duo For King & Country, and Moriah is a solo artist who won a Grammy in 2022.
The film was shot largely in Almeria, Andalusia, Spain, a region so frequently used as a stand-in for the ancient Middle East that it hosted productions including Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and multiple Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns.
Despite mixed critical reviews, audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an A-minus grade, indicating a significant gap between professional critic response and the reaction of the target audience.
Milo Manheim, who plays Joseph, is the son of actress Camryn Manheim. He got his break on Disney Channel's Zombies franchise before making his feature film debut here.
Cast
