Passion Play
The most controversial (and most successful) film of 2004 was Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Fans praised the film as a profound, harrowing, and moving depiction of the last 12 hours of Christ's life. Critics were distressed that the film seemed to revel in torture and brutality - that it made you experience Christ's death, but without showing why his life mattered. (Gibson insisted that the film was simply a literal depiction of that part of the New Testament, which may make it an object lesson in the difference between words on the page and images on the screen.)
But there was another passion play in theaters just one year later which generated no such controversy - in part because it avoided the unrelenting brutality of Gibson's film, but primarily because it was disguised as a special-effects adventure movie, and most people (including me, the first time I saw it) were so caught up in the action that we failed to see what else was going on. It isn't literal - Kong is not supposed to be Christ, and the film is not a point-by-point retelling of the Gospels; rather, images and scenes from one story keep evoking the other.
[Note on the Gospels: There are a number of good modern translations of the Bible which render the text into clear, compelling, idiomatic English; but by the same token, they lack the familiarity of the King James version. Because I am drawing parallels between two well-known stories which are not normally thought of together, I have elected to use the King James translation, courtesy of the Gideons, so that my points are not obscured by unfamiliar words.]