Alexander Stuart

Enrique Irazoqui as Pasolini's remarkable Christ. The religious right should be blessed with an eternity – and I mean an eternity – of viewing Pier Paolo Pasolini's astonishing, beautiful, reverent and truly radical (as Jesus was, according to the gospels) The Gospel According To St Matthew , which I first saw when I was fourteen, was blown away by, and still - as a Buddhist for 21 years - think is a work that touches god, or whatever word you wish to use for truth, love, light and, the power to be compassionate and brave. Pasolini was a Marxist, a self-proclaimed atheist (although this film makes that hard to believe, and he later talked about his "nostalgia for faith"), a homosexual, had been sentenced in Italy for blasphemy - yet accepted an invitation by Pope XXIII in 1962 for a dialogue with non-Catholic artists and wound up making the only film about Jesus that has ever truly moved me. The music score alone is fantastic, surprising and unforgettable (