Someone taking another crack at Ben-Hur isn’t the worst idea in the world. While this new version tightens things up, it unfortunately suffers from both a curiously passive central character and some faith-based dramatic flattening. Still, it all comes down to the chariot race. Here, it’s just the same old newfangled mishmash of blurry close-ups—did they run out of pixels before they could get a proper establishing shot?—and machete-edited jumbles of dust and hooves. by Andrew Wright