The Seventh Seal

Fourteenth-century medieval Sweden, devastated by the Black Death. The knight Antonius Block returns from the Crusades and comes face to face with Death personified. Antonius challenges him to a game of chess, buying time to seek an answer to the question that haunts him: does God exist? In 1957, Ingmar Bergman made the film that turned the chess match with Death into the cinematic symbol of humanity's ultimate existential question.

The Seventh Seal is the most influential philosophical film in European cinema. Bergman captured the crisis of faith in images that have been quoted, parodied, and interpreted for decades. Max von Sydow at age 27: monumental.