Two films share this title and year. The one filed here is a scriptural drama with Lior Ashkenazi as Ezra and a narrator; the one the reviews describe is Guy Ritchie’s Afghanistan war film. We cannot recommend a title we cannot identify.
There are two films called The Covenant from 2023, and this page has one foot in each. The credits filed under this title belong to a biblical drama: Lior Ashkenazi as Ezra, Alexandra Gilbreath as the Narrator, Eli Danker as Joseph, Haitham Omari as Moses, Suleiman Suleiman and Noa Nikita Bleeker as Adam and Eve, Abdelkader El Hmamay as Noah. The reviews that have been published under the same title and year are, all of them, about Guy Ritchie’s war film, in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays an American sergeant and Dar Salim his Afghan interpreter. Not one name is shared between the two.
We should say what we can see and what we cannot. The credits here run from the garden to the return from exile, with a Pharaoh, a Joshua, a Sarah and a Hagar and a Potiphar’s wife along the way, and a narrator to hold it together. That is the shape of a survey of scripture rather than a single story, the sort of thing that moves from tableau to tableau with a voice over the top. It is listed as drama, history and fantasy. Beyond the cast, the record is empty: no director, no cinematographer, no editor, no composer, no runtime, no certificate, no release date in this country or any other.
We have not seen it. We say that plainly because the alternative is to pretend, and a reader on a sofa deserves better than a guess dressed as a verdict. We can tell you that Ashkenazi is a fine, heavy-lidded actor who has anchored serious Israeli films for two decades, and that a version of Ezra with him at the centre is a promising idea. We cannot tell you whether this is that version, or how long it runs, or who lit it.
What we felt, reading the two sets of credits side by side, was something close to embarrassment on the reader’s behalf. Most people who type this title into a search box want Ritchie’s film. They will find, filed under it, a list of prophets. The reviews so far, sixteen of them, land at a consensus of 68 for the war film, with critics divided over whether Ritchie’s straighter, more sober style is a welcome change or a waste of him, and near-unanimous that Salim is the best thing in it. None of that praise or complaint can be laid over a film about Noah and Moses, and we will not pretend it can.
Nor can we review Ritchie’s film in its place. We know it exists and we know who is in it, but we do not have its crew, its runtime or its release in front of us, and a review of ours that named a cinematographer from memory would be worth exactly what it cost. The rule is simple: if we cannot check it, we do not print it. That rule is the only reason a stranger should trust the next review we write.
So what is the score for? It sits in the middle because that is where a title goes when we can find nothing to recommend and nothing to condemn. It is not a judgment of the biblical film, which may be devout and dull or devout and remarkable for all we know. It is a warning that this entry, as it stands, is not the film most readers came looking for, and that the film it is has not been seen or written about by anyone whose work we have read.
If you wanted the war film, the recommendations below include one that will get you partway there. If you wanted scripture on screen, they include four that we can vouch for, which is more than we can say for the title at the top of the page.
