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The Testing of Faith

Watch these together when you want cinema that puts belief on the rack — devout men pushed to the brink of renouncing everything while their bodies are broken and their souls interrogated.

Largely demanding, film-school-canonical work (Scorsese's two provocations, Shepitko's frozen masterpiece) anchored by one crowd-pleaser — reach for it when you want films that wrestle rather than comfort, and only when you're ready to sit with suffering.

• Hacksaw Ridge (2016)
• Silence (2016)
• The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
• The Ascent (1977)
• The Mission (1986) — The overlooked Palme d'Or that rhymes with Silence — a Jesuit builds a mission among the Guaraní only to watch faith collide with empire and slaughter above the great falls, devotion tested to martyrdom; if these landed, this is the one to finally pull down.
• The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1965) — If The Last Temptation of Christ gripped you, this is the austere Christ film to recollect — Pasolini stages Matthew's gospel word-for-word with farmers' faces in the sun-blasted Italian south, reverent and revolutionary at once, the film-school companion to Scorsese's provocation.
• Jesus of Montreal (1989) — The under-seen one where an actor hired to freshen a Passion play is slowly consumed by the role until the sacred story breaks his body in the modern world — belief put on the rack by the same questions these films ask of the devout.