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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...

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

Heaven Can Wait (1978)

6.9/10
Director: Warren Beatty, Buck Henry
Starring: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, James Mason, Charles Grodin, Dyan Cannon, Buck He...

In this remake of 'Here Comes Mr Jordan', Warren Beatty stars as a quarterback who is taken to Heaven before his time, but because his body on Earth i... Read more

Jesus of Nazareth (Blu-Ray) (1977)

8.5/10
Director: Franco Zeffirelli
Starring: Anne Bancroft, Anthony Quinn, Christopher Plummer, Claudia Cardinale, Donald Ple...

Beginning before the Nativity and extending through the Crucifixion and Resurrection, this mini-series brings to life all of the sweeping drama in the... Read more

Jesus of Nazareth (1977)

8.5/10
Director: Franco Zeffirelli
Starring: Robert Powell, Olivia Hussey, Anne Bancroft, Ernest Borgnine, Claudia Cardinale,...

Franco Zeffirelli's highly acclaimed version of the life of Jesus. This epic, moving drama, filmed in Tunisia and Morocco, features a stellar internat... Read more

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Special Edition) (1977)

7.7/10
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Francois Truffaut

Writer/director Steven Spielberg's intelligent sci-fi story stars Richard Dreyfuss as an Indiana electrical lineman whose close encounter with a UFO o... 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

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

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

7.7/10
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Francois Truffaut

Power line repairman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) has a 'close encounter' with an alien spacecraft when he is sent out to investigate a mysterious pow... Read more

Network (1976)

8.1/10
Director: Sidney Lumet
Starring: William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, Robert Duvall, Ned Beatty

A savage satire written by Paddy Chayefsky, looking at the powers behind television programming. Even more compelling and relevant today than when it... Read more

The Hiding Place (1975)

7.6/10
Director: James F Collier
Starring: Julie Harris, Jeannette Clift

The award-winning wartime drama, based on the real-life exploits of Corrie Ten Boom, a Dutch woman who was sent to a Nazi concentration camp with her... Read more