It’s still the Jesus movie to beat. True to form for an Italian neorealist film, Enrique Irazoqui was not a professional actor. The teenage economics student and Communist activist met director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who cast him for the part of Christ. Finally, we have a (probably historically accurate) short-haired Jesus with a (historically likely) unibrow. Irazoqui wasn’t the most skilled actor, yet thanks to Pasolini’s approach, the film is perfect — so perfect it makes all other Jesus depictions seem corny. Even the Vatican itself agreed, with the film making the Vatican’s 1995 official list of 45 “important movies.” Irazoqui brings his political fire to the role of a rabble-rousing Jesus.

“Rock opera Jesus” sounded like a great idea in the early 1970s. And with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music, it works a lot better than you’d think. But Jesus as a late-1960s charismatic longhair is almost too on the nose, and Ted Neeley’s Christ is just too pretty and bright-eyed to signal the fiery quality others have brought to the role. It doesn’t help that he’s upstaged (as an actor and a vocalist) by Carl Anderson’s Judas, but that’s partly by design.

Director Martin Scorsese wanted Aidan Quinn for the role, but he got Willem Dafoe instead. With his sandy-colored hair and blue eyes, Dafoe’s Jesus at first resembles the all-American Christ of the mid-century Hollywood epics. But in temperament, he’s frequently the stormy, memeable Dafoe we’ve come to love, gnashing his teeth and knocking the crap out of the moneylenders in the temple, with wonderful pathos throughout. Unlike the other depictions, thanks to the Nikos Kazantzakis novel the film is based on, we get a “what if Jesus didn’t die” alternate timeline with an older, gray-haired, very frail Jesus. And unlike the other actors, Dafoe didn’t hesitate to take to the cross fully nude.