"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...
With the idiosyncratic American fable "Harold and Maude", countercultural director Hal Ashby fashioned what would become the cult classic of its era.... Read more
Stanley Kubrick's dark, dazzling, ironic tale of an ultra-violent future filled with marauding gangs, decaying cities and bizarre technologies. Follow... Read more
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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