In Theory: Religious leaders share their favorite films

The summer blockbuster movie season is starting to heat up, with movies as “X-Men: Origins,” “Star Trek” and “Harry Potter” opening soon. What films, currently showing or not, do you recommend for people seeking “alternative” choices?

Most of the movies on my list of favorites are either feel-good movies (“Babe,” “Hoosiers,” “The Full Monty”) or parables of human life and redemption (“Pleasantville,” “Field of Dreams,” “A River Runs Through It”). Among explicitly religious films, “The Mission” (powerful descriptions of penitence and the power of love) and “The Last Temptation of Christ” (a rare non-smarmy Jesus, plus an amazing soundtrack by Peter Gabriel) are my favorites.

I’ll tell you about two films you may not know about. Both of them fall under the category of “Cinematography as Spiritual Experience.” They’re lush, visually beautiful and spiritually evocative:

 “Baraka” (1993)

Shot on six continents and in 24 countries, Baraka explores the formation and evolution of earth, the ascendance of man and the consequences of technology.

From Roger Ebert’s review:

“Time-lapse photography [is] a visual demonstration of how fleeting life is; of how the decisions that seem momentous on our time scale are flickering instants in the life of the planet. Somehow the technique makes the earth and its inhabitants seem touchingly fragile.

“Against this fragility, humanity has raised the bulwark of religion, and the cameras show us mortals in the act of worship, from the pope in St. Paul’s to rabbis at the Wailing Wall, from monks in ancient temples to an extraordinary tribe of chanters who lean this way and that in time to their prayer, waving their arms like trees tossed in a storm, led by a man who seems immensely pleased to be in the center of such ecstasy.

“The sound track combines ethnic music and chants with more Western ideas, and is a spiritual experience all by itself.”

 “Into Great Silence” (2007)

From the Zeitgeist Films website: