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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...

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

6.4/10
Director: Hironobu Sakaguchi
Starring: Ming-Na, Voices Of, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, James Woods, Donald Sutherland,...

The year is 2065 A.D. The Earth is infested with alien spirits and mankind faces total extinction. Led by a strange dream and guided by her mentor, Dr... Read more

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within ( Blu-ray ) (2001)

6.4/10
Director: Hironobu Sakaguchi
Starring: Alec Baldwin, Donald Sutherland, James Woods, Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames, Ming-...

The year is 2065 A.D. The Earth is infested with alien spirits and mankind faces total extinction. Led by a strange dream and guided by her mentor, Dr... Read more

Flatliners (1990)

6.6/10
Director: Joel Schumacher
Starring: Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin, Oliver Platt

An offbeat thriller about a group of medical students who experiment with life after death. They kill each other one by one and then are brought back... Read more

Flatliners ( Blu-ray ) (1990)

6.6/10
Director: Joel Schumacher
Starring: Julia Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin, Oliver Platt

An offbeat thriller about a group of medical students who experiment with life after death. They kill each other one by one and then are brought back... Read more

Forbidden Planet (1956)

7.6/10
Director: Fred M Wilcox
Starring: Robby the Robot, Warren Stevens, Walter Pidgeon, Leslie Nielsen, Anne Francis

'The best of the science fiction interstellar productions of the fifties', according to Pauline Kael. The action takes place in the year 2257 on the p... Read more

Forrest Gump (1994)

8.8/10
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Mykelti Williamson, Tom Hanks, Sally Field, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise

Winner of six Oscars, including Best Picture, Director and Actor, Robert Zemeckis' modern-day fable stars Tom Hanks as the simple-minded but good-hear... Read more

Francesco Giullare Di Dio (1950)

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Starring: Aldo Fabrizi, Arabella Lemaitre

A.k.a. "Francis, God's Jester". Roberto Rossellini and co-writer Federico Fellini lovingly render the very spirit of Franciscan teaching in this extr... Read more

Francis of Assisi (1961)

6.5/10
Director: Michael Curtiz
Starring: Bradford Dillman, Dolores Hart, Stuart Whitman, Cecil Kellaway

Michael Curtiz brings the life of St Francis to the screen in this colourful religious epic. Dolores Hart co-stars as the noblewoman who forsakes her... Read more

Frequency (2000)

7.4/10
Director: Gregory Hoblit
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Jim Caviezel, Andre Braugher, Elizabeth Mitchell

Thirty years after New York firefighter Dennis Quaid is killed in a warehouse blaze, his now grown son, policeman Jim Caviezel, discovers his old ham... Read more

Gandhi (1982)

8.1/10
Director: Richard Attenborough
Starring: Ben Kingsley, Candice Bergen, Edward Fox, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, John Mill...

Richard Attenborough's Academy Award-winning epic follows the extraordinary life of Mahatma Gandhi (played by Ben Kingsley), from his beginnings as a... Read more