A quarter-century has done strange things to “Dogma,” Kevin Smith’s controversial fourth feature. What once felt like provocation now feels like a relic of a time when even irreverence had faith in something beyond the punchline. Like natural wine — fermented with minimal intervention, unpredictable, sometimes sour, sometimes sublime — the film has aged in ways that aren’t necessarily better, just more alive. What lingers isn’t the controversy or the crudeness, but the tenderness buried beneath the blasphemy.

Now, 25 years later, “Dogma” is returning to screens in a way that suggests its relevance has outlasted its controversy. The film has been restored in 4K by Triple Media Film, supervised by Robert Yeoman (“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “Bridesmaids”). After a sold-out 20-city tour, “Dogma” screened at Cannes as part of the Cannes Classics 2025 lineup, a recognition that places it alongside some of cinema’s most influential works. The remaster also returned to 1,500 theaters across North America this week. For a film once deemed too provocative for mainstream distribution, its inclusion at Cannes and re-emergence on the big screen point to a lingering cultural footprint that demands attention.

That Cannes chose to include “Dogma” in its Classics lineup reflects a growing re-evaluation of which films matter. The canon is expanding, making room not only for high formalism and critical darlings but messy, sincere works that capture something essential about their time. The restoration doesn’t just preserve the film — it reasserts it as a vital artifact of spiritual pop cinema, one that sits in dialogue with both mainstream religion and its skeptical counter-narratives.

In many ways, Smith’s film feels even riskier now than it did in 1999. Today’s cultural climate is often hostile to religious questioning from within and dismissive of satire that doesn’t pick a side. Social media outrage cycles can ignite over far less, yet few recent films have approached religion with the same mix of irreverence and empathy. In its clumsy way, “Dogma” dared to imagine that God might still matter — not........

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