Religious cinema is, in contemporary American film, an unusual genre. The major studios have largely abandoned the framework that produced the Hollywood Golden Age religious epics (The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, The Greatest Story Ever Told); contemporary religious-themed major-studio production is rare. The contemporary religious cinema canon is, instead, almost entirely indie-and-international production. The ten films below represent the strongest contemporary religious cinema across the past forty years.
The structural pattern across religious cinema is that the strongest contemporary entries are those that engage religious material as serious subject rather than as either dismissive satire or as straightforward devotional confirmation. The films above all treat religious experience and religious institutions as substantive material whose specific texture deserves the same craft-attention that conventional cinema gives to political or romantic material. The willingness to engage religious material at this craft-level is, in contemporary American film, increasingly rare; the films that do engage at this level have, almost without exception, generated substantial reception across the international art-cinema framework.
The Schrader-Scorsese spiritual cinema
- Silence (2016) — Martin Scorsese's Shusaku Endo adaptation. Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver as 17th-century Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in Japan. Best Cinematography Oscar nomination. One of Scorsese's most-personal projects.
- The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) — Martin Scorsese's Nikos Kazantzakis adaptation. The film's portrayal of Jesus Christ's psychological-spiritual struggle generated substantial Catholic-establishment opposition on release. Best Director nomination.
- First Reformed (2017) — Paul Schrader's late-career religious drama. Ethan Hawke as a Protestant pastor in upstate New York. Best Original Screenplay nomination. Schrader's working acknowledgement of the Bresson-Bergman-Tarkovsky tradition that shaped his own working approach.
The European religious art cinema
- Ida (2013) — Paweł Pawlikowski's Polish-language black-and-white drama. Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The film engages Catholic-novice and Jewish-aunt material across post-Holocaust Polish landscape.
- Of Gods and Men (2010) — Xavier Beauvois's French Trappist-monk drama. Based on the 1996 Tibhirine-monastery martyrs incident. Grand Prix at Cannes.
- Diary of a Country Priest (1951) — Robert Bresson's Georges Bernanos adaptation. The foundational French Catholic art-cinema entry whose subsequent influence on Schrader and others has been substantial.
The American faith-and-doubt drama
- Doubt (2008) — John Patrick Shanley's adaptation of his own Pulitzer-winning play. Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis — all four lead actors received Oscar nominations.
- Calvary (2014) — John Michael McDonagh's Irish Catholic priest drama. Brendan Gleeson as a small-town priest facing a confessional death threat.
- A Hidden Life (2019) — Terrence Malick's Franz Jägerstätter biographical drama. The Austrian-Catholic conscientious-objector during WWII whose Nazi-resistance and execution the film engages as religious-witness material.
The cosmological religious cinema
- The Tree of Life (2011) — Terrence Malick's cosmic-and-personal religious meditation. Brad Pitt and Sean Penn. Palme d'Or at Cannes. Three Oscar nominations. The film operates simultaneously as 1950s-Texas-family memoir and as cosmic-creation theological meditation.