2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick spent four years on 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the gap between Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange, and released it in April 1968, six months before Apollo 8 actually orbited the moon. It was badly misunderstood at first. Major critics walked out of the New York premiere, and it took roughly a decade for the consensus to settle that it was one of the peaks of the medium.

It unfolds in four movements: proto-humans on the African savanna, a 21st-century scientific mission to a buried monolith, a deep-space voyage to Jupiter aboard the Discovery One, and a last passage that leaves conventional narrative behind altogether. HAL 9000, voiced by Douglas Rain and embodied by a single red lens, became the most psychologically complex artificial intelligence ever put on film. Kubrick wrote the screenplay with Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the novel in parallel, and there is almost no dialogue in it. Douglas Trumbull's visual effects won the film's sole Academy Award.

It now sits permanently near the top of the Sight & Sound poll, and its influence runs from Solaris and Alien to Interstellar and Arrival. None of those descendants has matched its willingness to slow cinema down to ritual time and leave a question unanswered, trusting the image alone to carry the weight of philosophy.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: Science fiction on screen is usually cinema at its most spectacular; here it is the most demanding form the art has. Few works in any medium take their own questions this seriously, or trust their audience this completely.