In the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, a 1951 Hollywood studio executive sets up a roundtable consultation with church leaders — a rabbi, a Catholic priest, a Greek Orthodox priest, and a Protestant minister — in preparation for their forthcoming “life of Jesus” picture Hail, Caesar! A Tale of the Christ. The studio’s goal is to make a movie acceptable to all faiths.

Unfortunately, the interfaith roundtable can’t agree on anything. So the executive opts for a typical Hollywood approach, shifting away from questions of God, Jesus, and divinity to the conversion of a Roman centurion played by a major star, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney). Whitlock’s big scene peaks with a close-up of him staring upward, gobsmacked by sudden belief in the crucified Christ, who is too holy to be shown directly on-screen.

The comedy relies on our sense of having seen this many times before in a hodgepodge of Hollywood religious epics — most of which still air every Easter, such as 1959’s Ben-Hur, 1961’s King of Kings, and 1965’s The Greatest Story Ever Told. William Wyler’s Ben-Hur is probably the best of the lot because of its oblique approach to religious conversion and its very brief appearance of Jesus. The film’s title character, a Jewish aristocrat played by Charlton Heston, has many action-packed adventures, getting kidnapped into slavery and shipwrecked and trained to participate in a kick-ass chariot race before he ever encounters Jesus of Nazareth.