It opens today; the last film to generate this kind of controversy was probably Oliver Stone's JFK (I was going to say The Last Temptation of Christ, until I remembered the angry debates on shows like Nightline that Stone's film generated at the time of its release about its historical accuracy.)

Speaking of controversy, how's this for mixed reviews? Roger Ebert gives the film four stars.

Simultaneously, my friend Jami Bernard, of the New York Daily News, not only gives it one star, but writes, "Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II."

Wow.

It's difficult--very difficult--for me to imagine Mel Gibson deliberately making an anti-Semitic film, considering the industry that he works in, and one would imagine, plans to continue working in for several more decades.

Jeff Jacoby writes:

Is "The Passion" antisemitic? That depends on whether it is antisemitic to re-enact the story told by the Christian Bible. To be sure, there is a good deal in Gibson's movie that is not in the New Testament. In one scene, for example, Judas is driven to commit suicide by a gang of demonic Jewish children. In another, Pontius Pilate, beholding a shackled Jesus who has already been beaten bloody by Jewish guards, chastises the High Priest: "Do you always punish your prisoners before they are judged?"

But there is no getting around the fact that the parts of "The Passion" that are the most unflattering to Jews -- the bloody-minded and hateful Temple priests, the Judean mob howling for Jesus's death -- come straight out of the Gospels. I shudder at those depictions and reject them as historically false, but I cannot call a Christian antisemitic for believing in the truth of his Bible. I will not smear Gibson as a Jew-hater.

But neither will I pretend that he is unaware of the long and horrid history of Passion plays, or of the millions of Jews who have died at the hands of killers demonizing them as "Christ-killers." It is not unreasonable to worry about the effect of a movie like "The Passion" at a time of surging antisemitism.

UPDATE: James Bowman is my go-to guy for hardcore conservative film commentary. And he's none-too-impressed with The Passion:

The accusations of anti-Semitism which have done so much to keep this film in the news for nearly a year before its opening stem, I take it, from this tremendous thrashing that precedes the actual crucifixion. They are to some extent a bum rap. Gibson does not seem to me to go out of his way to stress the Jewishness of the Jewish priests and Pharisees such as Annas (Toni Bertorelli) and Caiaphas (Mattia Sbragia), nor of the Jerusalem mob chanting "Crucify him!" My admittedly unpractised eye caught no stereotypes. The Roman soldiers — a brutal and undisciplined rabble motivated by nothing but sadism — come off worse than anybody. At the same time, Mel Gibson must have known that, in taking torture and brutality as his subject in preference to more traditionally spiritual considerations, he ensured that not only those who were implicated in such a crime but also those with a history of being unfairly implicated in it would feel themselves aggrieved. My guess is that he’s not sorry to have stirred up this hornet’s nest.

At any rate, it takes our minds off what’s really wrong with the movie. I have the most tremendous admiration for Pope John Paul II, but if he really said on seeing the film as he was at first reported to have said (before an official spokesman denied it) that "It is as it was" then I don’t think much of him as a movie critic. The one thing we can be absolutely sure of is that it is as it wasn’t. For although much publicity has been given to the fact that the screenplay is in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, and Latin, the language of the Roman imperial authorities, much less well known is the fact that it is also in a third language and that is Movieish, the language of the long line of cinematic sufferers that have come before this Jesus and that cannot but distract us from a proper consideration of what is, after all, meant to be a unique event in human history.

Nor is it only the scourging and beating which is written in Hollywoodese. Allusions to other movies range from Chuckie-like child sprites out of mainstream horror flicks to a pale Bergmanian devil with a dramatically gratuitous snake to certify his scriptural authenticity. There is even at one point a computer-animated movie demon like something out of The Devil’s Advocate or The Ninth Gate. This kind of thing I found at least as dislocating to the sense of occasion as if, instead of Latin and Aramaic, the movie had been made in Brooklynese. All of which is simply to say that The Passion of the Christ is like every other Mel Gibson picture in being ridiculously overproduced. As the British would say, he has once again over-egged the pudding. The new age music with pan pipes and wordless choruses, the swelling orchestral sounds at moments of significance, the flashbacks cross cut with the main action so as to produce heavy-handed ironies — all these things take us annoyingly out of the period and plonk us down jarringly in the entertainment culture of the present day.

ANOTHER UPDATE: When I wrote above that "It's difficult--very difficult--for me to imagine Mel Gibson deliberately making an anti-Semitic film, considering the industry that he works in". I was unconsciously alluding to a word to most familiar to Hollywood: blacklisting. Bill Sulik (oops, excuse me, "Václav Patrik Šulik"(!)) writes about just that possibility, but then asks:

You mean Hollywood might maintain it's own blacklist?

That can't be true.

LAST UPDATE TO THIS POST: I have more here.