Posted on by Christopher Benson

A personal canon of movies

In Popcultured: Thinking Christianly About Style, Media, and Entertainment, Steve Turner writes:

The goal of a film should be enrichment or enlightenment, not conversion. Enrichment means that the viewers leave the film feeling better off for having seen it; maybe they feel heartened or enlarged, maybe just less stressed or more at peace. Enlightenment means viewers understand more about themselves, other people or the world. Maybe the film has exposed some evil they weren’t aware of or some blessing they’d previously ignored. All conversions enrich and enlighten but not all experiences of enrichment and enlightenment are conversions.

When filmmakers deliberately make films in order to convert people, they inevitably fail to enrich or enlighten. As a member of the audience you can tell that the director has no interest in the story or the art of film. Everything has been put in the service of changing your mind. This usually results in characters that are only there to represent a particular point of view. They have no depth, no unpredictability and they’re not real enough to make us care what happens to them.

Here are the films that have enriched or enlightened me:

    • A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
    • Rear Window (1954)
    • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
    • West Side Story (1961)
    • To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
    • The Sound of Music (1965)
    • Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), The Return of the Jedi (1983)
    • Annie Hall (1977)
    • Days of Heaven (1978)
    • Ordinary People (1980)
    • Chariots of Fire (1981)
    • Amadeus (1984)
    • A Room with a View (1986)
    • The Mission (1986)
    • Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
    • Bird (1988) – a biopic on Charlie Parker
    • Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
    • Dead Poet’s Society (1989)
    • Awakenings (1990)
    • Howards End (1992)
    • Scent of a Woman (1992)
    • Unforgiven (1992)
    • The Remains of the Day (1993)
    • Shadowlands (1993)
    • Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)
    • The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
    • Sense and Sensibility (1995)
    • Heat (1995)
    • Waiting for Guffman (1996)
    • Shine (1996)
    • Romeo + Juliet (1996)
    • Good Will Hunting (1997)
    • As Good as It Gets (1997)
    • The Apostle (1997)
    • Elizabeth (1998)
    • The Thin Red Line (1998)
    • Magnolia (1999)
    • Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
    • Titus (1999)
    • The Insider (1999)
    • Best in Show (2000)
    • In the Bedroom (2001)
    • Wit (2001)
    • The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), The Return of the King (2003)
    • The Hours (2002)
    • About Schmidt (2002)
    • Dogville (2003)
    • Collateral (2004)
    • Batman: Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
    • Match Point (2005)
    • Bright Star (2005) – a biopic on John Keats
    • Into Great Silence (2005)
    • Babel (2006)
    • No Country for Old Men (2007)
    • Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
    • There Will Be Blood (2007)
    • Into the Wild (2007)
    • Doubt (2008)
    • The Hurt Locker (2009)
    • Get Low (2010)
    • True Grit (2010)
    • The Social Network (2010)
    • Of Gods and Men (2010)
    • The Tree of Life (2011)
    • Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
    • Her (2013)
    • 12 Years a Slave (2013)
    • Ida (2014)
    • Calvary (2014)
    • Whiplash (2014)
    • Macbeth (2015)
    • An Inspector Calls (2015)
    • The Revenant (2015)
    • Ex Machina (2015)
    • Fences (2016)
    • Silence (2016)
    • Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary (2016)
    • A Quiet Passion (2017) – a biopic on Emily Dickinson
    • Darkest Hour (2017)
    • Hostiles (2017)
    • A Ghost Story (2017)
    • Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (2018)
    • The Happy Prince (2018)
    • At Eternity’s Gate (2018)
    • Green Book (2018)
    • The Rider (2018)
    • Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool (2019)
    • The Two Popes (2019)
    • A Hidden Life (2019)
    • Nomadland (2020)
    • The Green Knight (2021)
    • The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)
    • Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues (2022)
    • Montana Story (2022)
    • The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
    • The Quiet Girl (2022)
    • Emily (2022) – biopic on Emily Brontë
    • Close (2022)
    • The Holdovers (2023)
    • Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
    • Anatomy of the Fall (2023)
    • Wildcat (2024) – biopic on Flannery O’Connor

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