Spirit

May 13, 2025 — In this masterpiece of lived-in ethical complexity and high spiritual stakes, Abbas Kiarostami explores the tensions between provinciality and modernity, and between artists and their subjects.

Aug 28, 2024 — United by a meditative approach that captures the spiritual bounty of the natural landscape and the tolls of physical labor, this Mexican director’s films challenge stereotypical depictions of his country’s rural communities.

Feb 1, 2022 — Douglas Sirk’s 1956 masterpiece is a visceral tragedy that lays bare the spiritual malaise of the ruling class.

Nov 13, 2018 — Turning to theater for inspiration, Kenji Mizoguchi transformed a popular eighteenth-century play into a spiritually charged meditation on forbidden love and societal oppression.

Oct 12, 2018 — Two early works by Ingmar Bergman show the Swedish master grappling with the conventions of melodrama, which would go on to influence his later explorations of spiritual torment.

Jul 18, 2017 — During a period of personal turmoil, Andrei Tarkovsky created this enigmatic masterpiece, which explores spiritual and metaphysical mysteries through the prism of a science-fiction epic.

Apr 7, 2017 — Barnaby Clay is a British film director from London. He graduated in 1996 from the London International Film School and has spent the past fifteen years directing music videos for bands and artists such as Gnarls Barkley, Dave Gahan, TV...

Jun 27, 2012 — The warrior and philosopher protagonist of The Samurai Trilogy, Musashi Miyamoto, was a real-life seventeenth-century figure. Here, the translator of Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings tells us about this fascinating man and his principles of swordplay and spirituality.

Jun 16, 2009 — In Tempo di viaggio (1983), the doodle Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra made for Italian TV as they prepped Nostalghia, the great struggling Russian answers a question about genre films by saying that his Solaris (1972) is “not so good,”...

A singular, iconoclastic artist and philosopher, Bresson illuminates the history of cinema with a spiritual yet socially incisive body of work.