Your favorite sublime, sacred & spiritual films?

Just so it's clear, I was a hundred percent serious about Blood for Dracula.


It's a film about slowly disappearing and dying and watching oneself slowly become irrelevant. It's about the fragility of existence and the failure of identity in a world you can't win in. And the fact that it is played out inside of a Joe Dallesandro sex romp, only makes it sting even more

A lot of people who watched Robocop didn't seem to realize that Verhoeven saw the character as being, essentially, "American Jesus".

I'm not kidding, he's been quite open about it:

It makes total sense American Jesus would be a resurrected policeman anointed with military-grade weaponry and legal immunity.

As Robocop is fond of saying, "Dead or alive, you're coming with me". In the end, we're all going to him.

It's also a very funny movie, both intentionally and unintentionally.


Kier vomitting blood everytime a woman lies to him about being a virgin is equal parts horrifying, depressing and hilarious.

That's actually the first movie I thought of when I saw this thread. Robo Jesus.

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I'm surprised these haven't been mentioned yet:

Andrei Rublev
El Topo
The Holy Mountain

But anyway, I've found that the best, or at least the most interesting movies about faith and spirituality are about the internal struggle. While they have their moments, I wouldn't describe them as sublime, sacred or transcendent, but they tend to leave more of an impression. To quote Charlie in Mean Streets, which is a good example of a movie like this, "you don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bull****, and you know it." Other good examples are Bad Lieutenant (which also stars Harvey Keitel, coincidentally) and Winter Light.

Here's another couple of films that IIRC haven't been mentioned either

Been there, done that.

Here's more on that allegory

I suppose that Bergman cannot be defeated in this category. Well... maybe by Tarkovsky, but I think that's as much a matter of one's personal spiritual orientation as filmmaking...

But if we are also considering the sublime, then I would definitely add The House that Jack Built.








The brief discussion on Speer really pulled everything together, I thought.

Defeated? I don't know about defeated, but I'll take Bunuel's views on religion over Bergman's any day of the week - and twice on Sunday.

Their views is one thing, but Bergman is infinitely superior to Bunuel. And I love Bunuel.

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Bunuel never made anything even close to Persona, so there's that.

Bergman never made anything as memorable as Simon del desierto, so there's that, too

I came to mention Simon of the Desert as well, but was pleasantly beaten to it.

I was very lucky to watch it when I was in college, and many years later it seems an even smarter and wiser film in a lot of ways than it did back then.

I must rewatch it. I thought it was very good but totally inferior to the stuff I watched back then (Tarr, Tarkovsky, Bergman, Dreyer, Angelopoulos, Mizoguchi, etc.).