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...
Life is Beautiful (1998)
8.6/10
Director: Roberto Benigni
Starring: Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi
Receiving Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor, Roberto Benigni's celebrated and popular film boldly blends a sentimental and humourou... Read more
Wings of Desire (1987)
8.1/10
Director: Wim Wenders
Starring: Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin, Otto Sander, Peter Falk, Curt Bois
'The first time I saw the film I thought it was a knockout; on second viewing it already seemed a classic,' wrote J. Hoberman of Wim Wenders' re-exami... Read more
Being There (1979)
8/10
Director: Hal Ashby
Starring: Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Warden, Melvyn Douglas, Richard Dysart, Ri...
Peter Sellers gives the performance of his career as Chance, a middle-aged gardener who's led a sheltered life and whose thoughts and behaviour are to... Read more
Andrei Rublev (1966)
8.2/10
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Starring: Anatoly Solonitsyn, Ivan Lapikov, Nikolai Grinko
Widely regarded as Tarkovsky's finest film 'Andrei Rublev' charts the life of the great icon painter through a turbulent period of 15th century Russia... Read more
Sliding Doors (1997)
6.8/10
Director: Peter Howitt
Starring: John Hannah, John Lynch, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeanne Tripplehorn
A likeable romantic-comedy about a woman who is given a chance to live her life twice, each time, choosing a different man. Will she get it right eith... Read more
Pleasantville (1998)
7.5/10
Director: Gary Ross
Starring: J T Walsh, Jeff Daniels, Joan Allen, Reese Witherspoon, Tobey Maguire, William H...
A kind of "Wizard of Oz" in reverse as two 1990's teenagers become trapped in the golly-gee suburban fantasy world of a 1950's sitcom, where everythin... Read more
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A Clockwork Orange (1971)
8.3/10
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Miriam Karlin, Patrick Magee, Malcolm McDowell, Adrienne Corri
Stanley Kubrick's dark, dazzling, ironic tale of an ultra-violent future filled with marauding gangs, decaying cities and bizarre technologies. Follow... 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
The Tree of Life (2011)
6.8/10
Director: Terrence Malick
Starring: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain
Written and directed by Terrence Malick, this complex and thought-provoking exploration of the human condition stars Brad Pitt as the patriarch of a M... Read more
The Terminator (1984)
8/10
Director: James Cameron
Starring: Paul Winfield, Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger
A cyborg is sent from the future to present-day Los Angeles on a deadly mission. He's got to kill a young woman whose life will have great significanc... Read more