“You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Laurence Fishbourne’s Morpheus poses these iconic options Read More …
Few religious dramas have been met with as much contention and protest as Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Based on the 1955 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, the film’s unorthodox portrayal of Jesus Christ (Willem Dafoe) and his battle with various forms of temptation Read More …
Your conception of the afterlife is put on the witness stand in this 1946 classic. We follow pilot Peter Carter as an oversight of cosmic bureaucracy leaves his soul in a tug of war between a sudden romance on earth and his eternal destination in Read More …
Watch Kenneth Morefield and Noel Manning discuss this list and the Arts & Faith history at Meet Me at the Movies. Listen to Arts & Faith voters Lindsey Dunn, Reed Lackey, and Brian Duignan discuss films on the list at 1 of My Stories. Click Read More …
The first iteration of the Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films has been preserved for posterity. Examining the list offers interesting insights on how the group has evolved through the years. At the time, the list was released with a statement that read: “The Top 100 Read More …
In 2022, I wrote that Dune takes the prompt of Luke 4:5-6 where the devil tempts Jesus and imagines a scenario in which a young prince might accept the devil’s temptation rather than reject it. This description is even more true of Dune: Part Two, Denis Villeneuve’s magnificent Read More …
In May of 2023, participants at Arts & Faith nominated and voted for their choices of the Top 25 “Spiritually Significant” Documentaries. Two rounds of voting were used to pick the finalists with the list being limited to one film per director. A final round Read More …
Empowering movies about women don’t have to tell stories about women overcoming circumstances, oppression, or violence; the most empowering narrative is often about overcoming ourselves. Queen of Katwe was one of the most effective feminist films of the year, recounting the true story of Phiona Mutesi, a Read More …
Famously made for under $10,000 in the early 1970s, Charles Burnett’s portrait of life in Watts never received a commercial release due to legal issues surrounding its use of music. But it was eventually chosen by the Library of Congress to be preserved in the Read More …
What the Dardenne brothers do best is this: look at that person you’d rather not notice — the woman weeping on the subway, the guy pulling some shady deal on the corner — and take a deep dive into where she came from and where Read More …