Dear God

Tom Turner is a small-time con artist who finally runs out of luck when he is caught. A judge offers him a straightforward choice: prison or a year of honest work. Tom takes the job, and he is assigned to the dead letter office of the United States Postal Service, where mail that cannot be delivered ends up. There he comes across letters addressed to God and begins answering them himself, at first as another scheme and then with money enclosed for the people who wrote them. His co-workers join in, moved to help strangers in need, and the effort grows beyond the office. The postmaster general and the police take a dim view of the operation, leaving Tom to deal with the consequences of his good deeds.

Garry Marshall directed the film, the ninth of the eighteen features he made, between Exit to Eden and Runaway Bride. Warren Leight and Ed Kaplan wrote the screenplay, and Steve Tisch produced. Greg Kinnear leads as Tom, with Laurie Metcalf, Maria Pitillo, Tim Conway, Héctor Elizondo and Jon Seda among the credited cast of ninety-six.

Released in November 1996, the comedy had a budget of 22 million dollars. On IMDb it holds a critics' rating of 3.7 out of 10 from 34 reviews, while on TMDB its audience rating is 5.4 out of 10 from 66 votes.