Please identify (1) your favorite Christian movie or your favorite secular movie with a strong Christian theme and (2) your favorite secular movie, and offer reasons for your 2 selections.
I am a retired United Methodist pastor with a Pentecostal background. As a pastor, I used to sponsor a dinner and spiritual movie night for several years on the last Friday of every month, excluding summer months. We advertised this in the local paper and attracted an interdenominational audience. Until my retirement in July, 2015, I had watched or researched most Christian movies and most secular movies with strong Christian themes. As a pastor, I had a bias for showing Christian movies, despite the fact that I considered the secular movies with strong Christian themes generally far superior in acting, script, and production values.
(1) My favorite spiritual movie of all time is without question, "The Mission," starring Robert DeNiro and Jeremy Irons, with a supporting role by a new actor (now famous), Liam Neeson.
The British Film Academy voted this the best movie ever on a spiritual theme and many of my male friends agree. Perhaps the violence in the movie prevents many women from rating it as highly as I do.
The Hollywood Screen Actors Guild voted the film's musical score the 17th best of all time, a remarkable vote considering that "The Mission" is not a musical. The movie did not enjoy great box office success here in the USA because, I think, its pace is a bit too slow for American attention spans.
"The Mission" is based on historical facts and tells the story of the Jesuits' 19th century attempt to convert an Amazon Indian tribe at the same time that the Spanish and Portuguese are trying to enslave them. In my opinion, the movie contains by far the most moving conversion story (of a slave trader) ever put on screen. After martyrdom, the Jesuits finally succeed in converting the tribe and bring them economic prosperity. But the Spanish and Portuguese governments can't tolerate the economic competition, and so, they get the Cardinal's permission to resume enslavement and the Jesuits are ordered to leave the tribe. What makes the movies so moving and profound to me is the way the Jesuits debate and respond to the order to leave. I'm unsure of the strategy I would use to handle this impossible situation. There is no better movie on the cost of discipleship.
(2) My favorite secular movie of all time is "Schindler's List" (starring Liam Neeson), the winner of several Academy Awards. I didn't show this movie to our Friday night church group because of its R-rated content and because it is not overtly spiritual in a Christian sense. The movie tells the true WW2 story of a greedy, womanizing German business man who sees Jews as cheap labor and employs them in his factory. But eventually his greed turns to compassion and he hires as many Jews as possible to save them from Nazi extermination. He even dares to claim them from concentration camps and rescues hundreds of Jewish women from Aschwitz! I view the movie as the most powerful movie illustration ever of how God can perfect His strength in human weakness. At the end of the movie, the actors playing Schindler's Jews join the survivors of the roughly 1,500 Jews he saved to lay honorary stones on his Jerusalem grave.
After WW2, Oscar Schindler's marriage and business ventures failed. But the Israelis brought him to Israel to be celebrated and honored in a tumultuous welcome. The wife of one Schindler Jew remarked to her husband, "We should not be giving our highest honor to such a morally flawed man." Her husband's response is profound: "Don't wish too hard that he would have been different than the way he was. If he had been different, he would not have done what he did!"