Films, like books, are as diverse as the people who create them. Many portray rare and beautiful stories of dignity, courage and compassion. Others depict characters and situations so disturbing, it can take a few days to "shake them off."
The films below cover the gamut. Some would probably not be classified as "spiritual." These are the ones that need to be wrestled with bravely. They need to have their ideological underpinnings exposed and evaluated again, in the light of faith.
Our job is to take our faith to the movies and stay alert. Spiritual messages may be overt and readily apparent, or they may be discerned only in our reactions to the scenes and stories we see on the screen. Sometimes the best message we can come away with is to follow an alternate way, God's way.
In focusing on film as a spiritual resource, explorefaith hopes to acknowledge the present reality of our popular culture from a position of faith. That doesn't mean that we agree with, or approve of a film under scrutiny—only that, rather than letting movies dictate a position to us, we go to the theater mindful of God within us, and intentionally create a space into which God can speak.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
For Torey Lightcap, the sixth Harry Potter film gives us just what we'd expect in the fight between good vs. evil. But don't think that will last...
The Village: A Film Built on Questions
In his 2004 film The Village, M. Night Shyamalan uses a 19th century Shaker-like community to pose pointed questions about purity, innocence and the utopian dream.
A PBS Requiem for Thomas Merton
Airing nationally on December 14, the documentary Soul Searching and its companion volume give us new insights into the life, work and faith of Thomas Merton.
At first brush, Warren Schmidt, the central character of this acclaimed film, would be easy to dismiss—his spiritual hunger appears negligible; his existence mundane—except for one thing: He is a whole lot like many of us.
I had mixed feelings about the film Amazing Grace , which opened in theaters on February 23. It was powerful, inspiring, and important—but it was also, at times, confusing and incomplete.
Batman Begins is the first truly great superhero film. While most superhero films tend to emphasize spectacle over story, Batman Begins is more akin to a character study masquerading as an action movie.
Blade Runner, The Final Cut (2007)
Many fans of Harrison Ford know nothing about this, his most intriguing, challenging and disturbing film.
Broken Flowers , the latest film from director Jim Jarmusch, is something of a puzzle. The movie is centered around Don Johnston, played by Bill Murray, a preoccupied man who lives in the luxury penthouse/prison of his own narcissism.
Cloverfield is the product of three people whose pedigrees are mostly built on television.... these men have a strong sense for the postmodern aesthetic, where meaning is left to the viewer, narrative is based on the putting-together of loose strands, and the standards of beauty are entirely subjective.
When people of faith go to the movies, they’re often on the lookout for spiritual content. For some films the search is more fruitful than for others. In the case of Crash , 2006's Academy Award® winner for Best Picture, the spiritually minded will not be disappointed.
We might boldly ask of these films, and those who populate them, what they would teach us about our faith lives.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
Torey Lightcap shines his light on the dark and desolate landscape of the latest film in the Harry Potter series
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
With each installment of the series, author J.K. Rowling has increased the spookiness and seriousness and danger, inching us along a seven-year tale of darkness and division and looming death-crusades, as we have learned who Voldemort is, what makes him so, and what he’ll do to earn his own brand of everlasting life.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Before he undertook the Herculean adaptation of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix , J.K. Rowling’s fifth installment in the inextinguishable Potter series, the director David Yates dwelt mostly in the world of television, making small-stage dramas about power—how it’s wielded, who has it, how quickly it can transmogrify into the apparatus of the corrupt or of the good.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter fans who have been eagerly awaiting the bespectacled young wizard’s return to Hogwarts will not be disappointed.
The majority of films are forgettable. A slim minority are entertaining. A precious few are insightful. And then, every so often, a film comes along that is truly significant. Hotel Rwanda is one such film.
How Should We Wait?
Let Bill Murray Show the Way
We know we must wait during Advent. In his 1993 classic film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray shows how to and how not to do just that.
Levity —featuring the stellar cast of Billy Bob Thornton (Manual Jordan), Morgan Freeman (Miles Evans), Holly Hunter (Adele Easley), and Kirsten Dunst (Sofia)—has earned major yawns from the professional movie critics who can't stand it and sustained applause from those who highly appraise it. Such ambiguous responses point to the movie's value for the religious seeker, for the film plumbs one of faith's most ambiguous themes—the price of redemption.
Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ
The movie is like an extended nineteenth-century revivial sermon that is long on judgment and short on grace.
Right when the formula calls for a “Rocky-like” character to start shouting “Adrian! Adrian!” with his/her eyes swollen shut and arms raised in victory, Eastwood pulls the old “one-two” and knocks us face-first onto the canvas.
Pan's Labyrinth runs under the tagline “Innocence has a power evil cannot imagine,” but happily Mr. del Toro labors at that truth with love, teasing it out slowly, so that finally we are compelled to do some pretty heavy lifting if we want what this piece is offering us
If you are like me and all you know about Ray Charles going in is that he was blind and smiled a lot when he played the piano, I strongly urge you to see this film.
When Hilary Faye (played by Mandy Moore), the most perfect and self-righteous teenage Christian prom queen, gets her comeuppance in Saved!, you don’t know whether to applaud or feel a twinge of concern.
Every now and then a big production movie comes along whose impact outpaces all the pre-release hype that puts it prancing in the starting gate. The movie startles and carries you for a ride worth remembering, if not taking over and again. Seabiscuit is such a movie.
Shadowlands is a touching, intelligent film about Narnia’s creator, C. S. Lewis, and his brief but tragic love affair with Joy Davidman Gresham.
Something's Gotta Give , a lighthearted, humorous depiction of the dilemmas faced by two characters growing old in a youth-oriented culture, is good entertainment. And more.
In terms of decoding what is at first glance a rather unusual title, one of the most poignant scenes in this film is a brief homemade video during which Tessa films her sleeping husband Justin—a British diplomat stationed in Kenya— while joking about how he is probably dreaming of a "world without weeds."
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
As Benjamin Button, Brad Pitt portrays someone who lives his life backward, from old man to infant. The curious thing is what he learns along the way.
It’s a summer action flick—a slow-moving and garrulous one, to be sure, but no more inherently plausible than when aliens attacked America ten summers ago in Independence Day.
With all the pre-emptive warnings that church groups circulated about The Golden Compass —advising religious folk to stay away from Christopher Weitz’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s first installment in the “His Dark Materials” trilogy—you’d think the film would be more…relevant.
The Human(izing) Christ of Film
Jesus' humanness has been portrayed in numerous ways in movies. Here Torey Lightcap takes a look at some of the more intriguing examples.
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
If you were a beaver and four humans showed up on your doorstep wearing fur coats, would you let them in? I certainly would have second thoughts. Funny how that idea never occurred to me before, even though I’ve read about the Pevensie children’s first encounter with the talking beavers of Narnia countless times.
My students often accuse me of madness, but they find nothing particularly controversial in my observation that The Matrix powerfully names and describes the forms of captivity into which we're born and within which we live and move and, by all appearances, have our being.
As Jada Pinkett Smith describes the Wachowski Brothers, "They know how to balance eye candy with deep thoughts."
The Matrix Revolutions makes you want to go back to the good old days of 1999, when the first of these movies, The Matrix , delivered so much and promised so much more.
Many films explore the power of art to redeem human depravity, but none with any more force than The Pianist.
Can Homer, Bart and the rest of the animated cast really teach us anything about faith?
We find these days that people don’t understand what it takes to present violence on film in ways that actually make us think or turn us to the good, and we’re left with the continuation of a grossly disturbing trend.
Its roots are in the conventions of the classic genre of the action film, but The Train is also a war movie and an ethical think-piece. And it’s this last element— the moral universe it inhabits —that can make this film so enticing to anyone on a spiritual journey.
