Faith From Many Angles

AS THE Academy Awards approach, I’d like to mention some films worthy of recognition by the lights of a different set of criteria. As a member of the Arts and Faith Ecumenical Jury, I am delighted to present our list of films from 2015 that “challenge, expand, or explore” faith, including those that illuminate religion and spirituality, pointing to a more humane vision of the world.

The choices are much more diverse than the usual annual polls. Multifaith stories (Irish Catholic, Israeli Jew, Iranian Muslim, just to start), exposés of injustice and calls for restoration, exile, and return, the damage done by immature religion, and the possibility of human spiritual evolution—all are here.

And the film we agree was the year’s best does something profoundly important: It tells the story of a weaponized individual who spends her time doing everything she can to avoid killing.

Some in our top 10 I’ve written about here before—our number nine is the fun and wise animated map of the emotions, Inside Out; eight is the immigrant tale Brooklyn; five is Brian Wilson mental illness and creativity biopic Love & Mercy; and four is the powerful investigative journalism drama Spotlight, a challenge to contemporary news media to once again pursue their higher calling to tell the truth for the common good. Here are the rest of our selections:

10. About Elly. Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi made this film in 2009, and it has been acclaimed as heralding “a new genre,” but it was not released in the U.S. until last year. Farhadi’s magnificent, compassionate dramas A Separation and The Past are more recent, but his ability to tell the most humane stories in the most gripping way was forged here.

7. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem. This explores religion’s shadow side in the context of a broken marriage in Israel and a husband who will not grant his wife’s desperate wish for freedom.

6. The Look of Silence. The companion to documentary activist Joshua Oppenheimer’s astonishing The Act of Killing, observing an optician confronting the men who killed his brother during the Indonesian genocide.

3. Timbuktu. A depiction of the interruption of quiet desert life by jihadists, Abderrahmane Sissako’s film is the first-ever submission by Mauritania to the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award category.

2. Stations of the Cross. A German film that has been called “among the most insightful and devastating cross-examinations of religious fundamentalism ... not an attack on faith ... but rather an examination of how faith goes wrong.”

1. The Assassin. An utterly remarkable film, by which I mean every single scene, perhaps even every single moment, of Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien’s work—it is imbued with beauty, compassion, and the strength to enact nonviolence.