Set Your Phasers to Spiritual—A Movie Watchlist For Contemplating The Big Stuff

Years and years ago, before “meme” wasn’t even a word, before the internet itself, I was teaching a college film course called Critical Approach to Cinema. The title alone stood as a warning that it was time to get attentive to the art of film.

One of the movies I showed the class was Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I knew that getting them to watch a film whose slow and deliberate unfolding of sound and image would require wholesale changes in their viewing reflexes.