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The director with the most films on the list is Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia's great Cold War director whose Christian faith not only found subtextual expression in his movies but also placed him in constant struggle with Soviet authorities. Some consider Andrei Rublev the ultimate statement on the place of the Christian artist in a fallen world; The Sacrifice and The Mirror may be the most obscure and difficult pieces on this list, and the science fiction films Stalker and Solaris some of the most unusual, but all are acknowledged masterpieces.

Australian director Peter Weir placed four films in the Top 100. Fearless is about a man whose life is transformed when he miraculously survives death in a terrible airplane crash; Witness is the story of a Philadelphia cop whose violent life is called into question when he takes refuge among the Amish; and The Truman Show is Jim Carrey's hit about a man whose entire life is filmed and broadcast on television. The Year of Living Dangerously is less well-known than the others, but may be the most spiritually significant Weir film of them all, with Linda Hunt's Oscar-nominated portrayal of outsider Billy Kwan giving us one of the most extraordinary Christians ever portrayed in film, obsessed with John the Baptist's question, "What then shall we do?"

The list also includes a number of hidden treasures, such as Close-Up, an Iranian quasi-documentary which begins oddly and simply but finishes by undermining our preconceptions about justice and mercy, truth and deception, restitution and reconciliation in this Muslim country; from Finland, The Man Without a Past, a droll character study with surprising spiritual resonance; Not of This World, the all-but-unknown story of a dry cleaner and a nun who find an abandoned baby in a public park somewhere in Rome; Belgium's The Son, an utterly riveting film in which almost nothing happens, but everything that does occur carries immense tension and emotional significance; and the indescribably strange Songs from the Second Floor, a surreal film with odd echoes of Ecclesiastes, and unforgettable images of yet another sacrifice of Christ in a garbage dump.

And then there are the "usual suspects," recent films whose spirituality may be blatant or hidden, but which seem always to come up when Christians talk about film: the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which renders the profoundly Christian truths of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy masterpiece in one of the most widely-seen films of all time; The Matrix, the spiritual film for many who came to faith at the end of the twentieth century, which may read better as a parable of spiritual rebirth than as a Christ-figure allegory; Chariots of Fire, the story of missionary and Olympian Eric Lidell, and one of the first films to portray an evangelical Christian in a positive light; Shadowlands, the definitive portrait of C. S. Lewis and his relationship with Joy Davidman, a relationship which reshaped his theology through love and suffering; American Beauty with its highly unorthodox affirmation of the divine love that banishes fear; Stephen King's story of faithfulness and friendship, The Shawshank Redemption; and M Night Shyamalan's brilliant meditation on mortality and forgiveness in the guise of a ghost story, The Sixth Sense, and his even more popular (if more artistically flawed) creatures-from-outer-space fright flick Signs, which is actually about a priest who must come to terms with grief and doubt; and Wings of Desire, the poetically evocative film Wim Wenders made as he came to faith, a vision of angels who long to do more than look into the lives of human beings.

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