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...
Le Quattro Volte ( Four Times ) (2010)
7.2/10
Director: Michelangelo Frammartino
Starring: Giuseppe Fuda, Bruno Timpano, Nazareno Timpano
An unclassifiably brilliant reverie on life, death, nature and the splendours of Calabria, "Le Quattro Volte" is a deceptively simple and playfully ph... Read more
Cocoon (1985)
6.7/10
Director: Ron Howard
Starring: Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley, Hume Cronyn, Brian Dennehy, Steve Guttenberg, Jessi...
Ron Howard directs a fine batch of Hollywood's senior citizens, who find that the Fountain of Youth is located not far from their Florida retirement c... Read more
Forrest Gump (1994)
8.8/10
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Mykelti Williamson, Tom Hanks, Sally Field, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise
Winner of six Oscars, including Best Picture, Director and Actor, Robert Zemeckis' modern-day fable stars Tom Hanks as the simple-minded but good-hear... Read more
Satantango (1994)
8.5/10
Director: Bela Tarr
Starring: Peter Berling, Janos Derzsi
Internationally acclaimed filmmaker Bela Tarr's epic rendering of Laszlo Karsnahorkai's novel about the decline of Communism in Eastern Europe, is a u... Read more
The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)
7.6/10
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
A few people arrive from Tehran for a short stay at Siah Dareh, a village in Iranian Kurdistan. The locals do not know why they are there. The strange... Read more
A Clockwork Orange ( Blu-ray ) (1971)
8.3/10
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Adrienne Corri, Miriam Karlin
Stanley Kubrick's dark, dazzling, ironic tale of an ultra-violent future filled with marauding gangs, decaying cities and bizarre technologies. Follow... Read more
Altered States (1980)
6.9/10
Director: Ken Russell
Starring: William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban, Charles Haid
William Hurt stars in a dazzling debut as a research scientist on an incredible journey into the inner space of the mind. He tries everything from ps... Read more
Lost Horizon (1937)
7.8/10
Director: Frank Capra
Starring: Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt, John Howard
Frank Capra's hypnotic and perversely appealing adaptation of James Hilton's novel is a work of lost innocence and spiritual redemption. A plane fleei... Read more
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
7.6/10
Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Barbara Hershey, Harry Dean Stanton, David Bowie
One of the most controversial films of recent years, this adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel is essentially about the battle raging within Jesus w... Read more
Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
7.9/10
Director: Robert Bresson
Starring: Anne Wiazemsky, Francois Lafarge, Philippe Asselin
Taking man's inhumanity to man as its central theme, this story traces the life of a donkey, christened Balthazar by a group of young children, from b... Read more