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...
Departures (2008)
8.1/10
Director: Yojiro Takita
Starring: Masahiro Motoki, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Kimiko Yo, Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Ryoko Hirosue, T...
When his orchestra disbands, Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) decides to start over and moves back to his small hometown. Desperate for work, he secr... Read more
Dersu Uzala (1975)
8.3/10
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Yuri Solomon, Maxim Munzuk
Kurosawa's remarkable, personal tale of the friendship between a wise old man and a young Soviet explorer, filmed in the beautiful expanse of Siberia,... Read more
Dersu Uzala (Blu-ray) (1975)
8.2/10
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Yuri Solomon, Maxim Munzuk
Kurosawa's remarkable, personal tale of the friendship between a wise old man and a young Soviet explorer, filmed in the beautiful expanse of Siberia,... Read more
Diary of a Country Priest (1950)
8/10
Director: Robert Bresson
Starring: Claude Laydu, Antoine Balpetre, Gaston Severin
A priest (Claude Laydu) arrives in the French country village of Ambricourt to attend to his first parish. The apathetic and hostile rural congregatio... Read more
Disobedience (2017)
6.6/10
Director: Sebastian Lelio
Starring: Alessandro Nivola, Rachel Weisz, Allan Corduner, Anton Lesser, Rachel McAdams, A...
New York photographer Ronit Krushka flies to London after learning about the death of her estranged father. Ronit is returning to the same Orthodox Je... Read more
Dogma (1999)
7.3/10
Director: Kevin Smith
Starring: Ben Affleck, Chris Rock, Matt Damon, Linda Fiorentino, Bud Cort
Wayward angels Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, exiled in Wisconsin for millenia, discover that a New Jersey church holds the theological key to their gett... Read more
Dogville (2003)
8/10
Director: Lars von Trier
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Harriet Andersson, Lauren Bacall, Jean-Marc Barr, Paul Bettany, B...
From director Lars von Trier ("Dancer in the Dark") comes this riveting drama focusing on mysterious fugitive Nicole Kidman as she hides from gangster... Read more
Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963)
8.4/10
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: George C Scott, James Earl Jones, Keenan Wynn, Peter Bull, Peter Sellers, Slim P...
A commie-hating, paranoid American general launches a flight of B-52 bombers at the Soviet Union with nuclear annihilation in mind. Since he is the on... Read more
Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb ( Blu-ray ) (1963)
8.4/10
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: George C Scott, James Earl Jones, Keenan Wynn, Peter Bull, Peter Sellers, Slim P...
A commie-hating, paranoid American general launches a flight of B-52 bombers at the Soviet Union with nuclear annihilation in mind. Since he is the on... Read more
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
7.9/10
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Robert MacNaughton, Peter Coyote, Henry Thomas, Drew Barrymore, Dee Wallace
The winner of 4 Oscars and now a classic, about a 10 year old boy befriending a creature from another planet that's been stranded on Earth. A warm, in... Read more