Biola students are no doubt familiar with streaming movies on Netflix and Hulu. Unfortunately, those streaming services are fairly limited when it comes to films that are hot out of the box office. Thankfully, most grocery stores have little red machines filled to the brim with movies released in recent months.

The downside to this? many of the movies found at Redbox are horrible. However, once you wade through the likes of “Rio 2” and “Bad Grandpa 0.5,” we will find some truly fantastic films.

This is the exact reason why Redbox Film Club exists. We here at the A&E section want to direct you to the best movies you can find so you do not have to spend an eternity scrolling through pages of movies you don’t care about while a family of five waits impatiently behind you.

For our first film, we selected “Philomena,” based on the book “The Lost Child of Philomena Lee” by Martin Sixsmith. The film chronicles the journey of Philomena (Judi Dench) and journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) to find the child she was forced by nuns to give up for adoption in 1955 after giving birth to him in a convent in Ireland. As we follow Martin and Philomena on their search for the truth of what happened to her son, whom she has not seen in 50 years, we see both the cruelty of religious legalism and the beauty of Christlike forgiveness.

The actors have superb mother and son-like chemistry, and though at it’s core a serious drama, the film gives us a bit of Steve Coogan’s sharp wit as well. Philomena is heart-wrenching and beautiful, and well worth the dollar you pay to rent it at Redbox. In fact, it might even be worth the $25.00 it costs to keep it.