The Gospel According to St. Matthew , IQ Score 168/200

Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1964 black-and-white adaptation of Matthew's Gospel, using only the actual Biblical text as dialogue, cast almost entirely with non-professionals, filmed in southern Italian villages. The structural commitment to letting the canonical religious-cinema premise operate from a self-declared Marxist-atheist director's perspective, and Pasolini's mother in the role of the elderly Mary, is the catalog's most-paradoxically-reverent religious film.