1. The Gospel According to St. Matthew, d. Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pasolini was a true enfant terrible - an Italian communist willfully seeking to offend the sensibilities of a corrupt society. Escaping the inferno of a traffic jam, he checked into a hotel and started reading Matthew’s Gospel. This beautiful film followed. Shot with documentary realism, we experience the bafflement and wonder which must have gone through the minds of the disciples.
2. Mean Streets, d. Martin Scorsese
"You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets..." Any film with a tag-line like this is going to be interesting, but Scorsese’s portrayal of Catholic guilt in Little Italy is incendiary.
3. The Apostle, d. Robert Duvall
The characters could have walked straight out of a Flannery O’Connor novel. Robert Duvall is a desperately flawed preacher who, despite his worst efforts, is an instrument of grace.
4. Wings of Desire, d. Wim Wenders
The black-and-white imagery of angels in a divided Berlin is famous, and was put to good use in U2’s Stay (Faraway So Close!) video. They also provided the music for the less admired Meg Ryan flick, City of Angels, which is - astonishingly - a rip-off of this utterly unfluffy masterpiece.
5. The Pledge, d. Sean Penn
On the night he is supposed to be retiring as a cop, Jack Nicholson swears "on his salvation" to find the killer of a child. This has some of modern cinema’s frankest expressions of tenderness, and glows with the numinous.
6. Three Colours Blue, d. Krzysztof Kieslowski
This film rescues 1 Corinthians 13 from the wedding ghetto – Juliette Binoche finishes her dead husband’s composition, in a gripping meditation on liberty, loss, fellowship and music.
7. Pulp Fiction, d. Quentin Tarantino
Pure Chaucerian vulgarity is employed to ask frank questions about whether or not the divine would intervene on behalf of not particularly good people.
8. Dogville, d. Lars von Trier
A stage play on screen, to the sound of gunfire and David Bowie, this three-hour epic gleefully demonstrates how a world without grace would end. It’s the film Joe McCarthy thought every liberal in Hollywood secretly wanted to make.
9. Italian for Beginners, d. Lone Scherfig
A thoroughly modern film – shot in sequential Dogme style without artificial lighting – which features some refreshingly sane believers wrestling with loss and love. It’s as if Bergman came out of retirement to make a date movie.
10. Crimes and Misdemeanours, d. Woody Allen
Wonderful comedy, musings on spiritual and physical blindness, and the crisis of living in a universe where the well-heeled can literally get away with murder. It even features Alan Alda!
Film Christianity
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