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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...

It's A Wonderful Life ( Blu-ray ) (1946)

8.6/10
Director: Frank Capra
Starring: Beulah Bondi, Donna Reed, Gloria Grahame, Henry Travers, James Stewart, Lionel B...

Classic bittersweet comedy/drama that is the quintessential Frank Capra film. James Stewart is a banker living in the typical American small town of B... Read more

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

8.6/10
Director: Frank Capra
Starring: Lionel Barrymore, James Stewart, Donna Reed

Classic bittersweet comedy/drama that is the quintessential Frank Capra film. James Stewart is a banker living in the typical American small town of B... Read more

The Song of Bernadette (1943)

7.7/10
Director: Henry King
Starring: Jennifer Jones, William Eythe, Charles Bickford, Vincent Price, Lee J Cobb, Glad...

This excellent story of the 19th-century French peasant girl who saw a vision of the Virgin Mary and found herself at the centre of a worldwide contro... Read more

Day of Wrath (1943)

8/10
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Starring: Thorkild Roose, Sigrid Nejiendam, Lisbeth Movin

Set in seventeenth-century Denmark, Day of Wrath is a dark and powerful tale of love and betrayal, and of a community obsessed with the fear of witchc... Read more

The Wizard of Oz ( Blu-ray ) (1939)

8/10
Director: Victor Fleming
Starring: Frank Morgan, Jack Haley, Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Billie Burke, Margaret Hamil...

Follow Dorothy over the rainbow and down the Yellow Brick Road, along with the Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, Cowardly Lion and Toto, too, for fun and adven... Read more

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

8/10
Director: Victor Fleming
Starring: Ray Bolger, Judy Garland, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, Billie Burke, Frank Morgan, Mar...

Follow Dorothy over the rainbow and down the Yellow Brick Road, along with the Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, Cowardly Lion and Toto, too, for fun and adven... 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

Sunrise (1927)

8.2/10
Director: F W Murnau
Starring: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston

Aka "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans". This exquisite silent film is just as powerful today as when it was made, telling the simple story of a farmer wh... Read more

Faust (1926)

8.1/10
Director: F W Murnau
Starring: Emil Jannings, Warner Fuetterer, Gosta Ekman

F.W. Murnau's last German film features astonishing photography, magnificent art direction, and special effects which retain the power to amaze. Freed... Read more