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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...

Harold and Maude (1971)

8/10
Director: Hal Ashby
Starring: Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort, Cyril Cusack, Vivian Pickles

With the idiosyncratic American fable "Harold and Maude", countercultural director Hal Ashby fashioned what would become the cult classic of its era.... Read more

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

THX 1138 (1970)

6.8/10
Director: George Lucas
Starring: Donald Pleasence, Maggie McOmie, Robert Duvall

George Lucas' first feature film is a thought-provoking look at a future society where robot police keep humans drugged and forbid any form of emotion... Read more

2001: A Space Odyssey ( Blu-ray ) (1968)

8.3/10
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, Leonard Rossiter, William Sylvester

Light years ahead of its time, this groundbreaking, visually stunning masterpiece grows even more wondrous as time passes. Beginning with The Dawn of... Read more

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

8.3/10
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Gary Lockwood, Keir Dullea, Leonard Rossiter, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter,...

Light years ahead of its time, this groundbreaking, visually stunning masterpiece grows even more wondrous as time passes. Beginning with The Dawn of... Read more

A Man for All Seasons ( Blu-ray ) (1966)

7.9/10
Director: Fred Zinnemann
Starring: Corin Redgrave, John Hurt, Leo McKern, Nigel Davenport, Orson Welles, Paul Scofi...

Adapted by Robert Bolt and Constance Willis from Bolt's hit stage play, A Man for All Seasons stars Paul Scofield, triumphantly repeating his stage ro... Read more

The Bible (1966)

6.3/10
Director: John Huston
Starring: Michael Parks, Richard Harris, John Huston, Stephen Boyd, Peter O'Toole, Franco...

An all-star cast, including George C Scott, Ava Gardner, Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris, heads this dramatic retelling of the first 22 Books of Gene... 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

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

A Man for All Seasons (1966)

7.9/10
Director: Fred Zinnemann
Starring: Wendy Hiller, John Hurt, Leo McKern, Paul Scofield, Robert Shaw, Orson Welles, S...

Adapted by Robert Bolt and Constance Willis from Bolt's hit stage play, this is a literate, penetrating treatment of the conflict between Thomas More... Read more