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Spiritual Cinema

"Movies containing spiritual, metaphysical, conscious or similar messages or themes". Simon Keyes explains the idea behind Spiritual Cinema. It is the extraordinary power of cinema, high or low, serious and exploitative, to move and disturb us that we should celebrate and embrace in all its diversity. Films can fertilise our inner lives and provide a counter-balance to that compartmentalisation of our "religious" selves that Thomas Merton dubbed our "personal holiness project". The feelings and shadows that films (well, perhaps not quite every movie) incarnate in us give us privileged access to the world beyond our immediate experience. The sights and sounds of cinema can resonate in the realms of the unconscious and the archetypal like no other medium, and there is much for us to learn about ourselves in this experience. Below is a list of "the best of" this genre...

Stalker (1979)

8.1/10
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Starring: Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Anatoly Solonitsyn

An extraordinary sci-fi film about an expedition into 'the zone', an eerie no-man's-land created by a meteor strike and depicted as a warped version o... Read more

Stalker (Blu-ray) (1979)

8.1/10
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Starring: Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Anatoly Solonitsyn

An extraordinary sci-fi film about an expedition into 'the zone', an eerie no-man's-land created by a meteor strike and depicted as a warped version o... Read more

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

7.3/10
Director: Leonard Nimoy
Starring: DeForest Kelley, Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, James Doohan, George Takei, Wal...

The crew of the Enterprise time-travel back to 1986 from the 23rd century in order to save Earth from a mysterious alien, and discover a world of punk... Read more

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home ( Blu-ray ) (1986)

7.3/10
Director: Leonard Nimoy
Starring: Catherine Hicks, DeForest Kelley, George Takei, James Doohan, Leonard Nimoy, Wil...

The crew of the Enterprise time-travel back to 1986 from the 23rd century in order to save Earth from a mysterious alien, and discover a world of punk... Read more

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977)

8.6/10
Director: George Lucas
Starring: Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Peter Cushing, Alec Guinness, Voice O...

The story of a boy, a girl and a universe. Now a classic, this blend of pulp magazine sci-fi, comic book action, old fashioned cliff-hanger story and... Read more

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (Blu-ray) (1977)

8.6/10
Director: George Lucas
Starring: Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Peter Cushing, Alec Guinness, Voice O...

The story of a boy, a girl and a universe. Now a classic, this blend of pulp magazine sci-fi, comic book action, old fashioned cliff-hanger story and... Read more

Starman (1984)

7/10
Director: John Carpenter
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith

Extremely pleasant, genteel film about an alien who lands on earth and abducts a young widow to help him travel cross-country so he can rendezvous wit... Read more

Starman (Blu-Ray) (1984)

7/10
Director: John Carpenter
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith, Richard Jaeckel, Lu Leonard

Answering a NASA message intended for aliens, a space being tries to contact mankind, but an American missile grounds his ship. Scrambling, the so-cal... Read more

Sunrise (1927)

8.2/10
Director: F W Murnau
Starring: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston

Aka "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans". This exquisite silent film is just as powerful today as when it was made, telling the simple story of a farmer wh... Read more

Sympathy for Delicious (2010)

5.8/10
Director: Mark Ruffalo
Starring: Juliette Lewis, Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo, Noah Emmerich, Orlando Bloom, Christ...

Paralyzed from the waist down after a motorcycle crash, homeless ex-club DJ Delicious D (Christopher Thornton) seeks help from Skid Row priest Father... Read more