The Seventh Seal (1957)

With 'The Seventh Seal', Ingmar Bergman essentially signed his name in the annals of classic cinema. He created some of the most celebrated and iconic images in movie history, and framed them within a beautiful yet painful tale about a knight (Von Sydow giving an astonishing career defining performance) returning to his homeland, torn apart by plague and suffering. Acted flawlessly by all of the cast, and beautifully shot in the countryside of Sweden, the film traces the Knight's journey as he heads home to his wife and Elsinore castle (an appropriate reference to Hamlet, as Bergman himself seems to ask the question: "To be or not to be"). Of course, as with almost all of Bergman's films, this becomes an exploratory meditation on faith, death and ultimately sacrifice. The fact that the image of Von Sydow's Antonius Block playing a game of chess for his life against Bengt Ekerot dressed as death has been so remembered and revered as such a brilliant and cynical a metaphor for life that it is parodied in popular culture on an almost daily basis is, if nothing else, a testament to the genius of Bergman and of this, one of his finest films. And yet Bergman surpasses even this iconic shot in the closing of his film, in the so called 'dance with death'. No moment in cinema has ever summed up so well all of the existential questions raised within one film, giving so much closure, and yet somehow so little.