Alexander Nevsky

Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938) marked the great Soviet director's return to favour after years in the wilderness, and his first completed sound film. Made as the threat of Nazi Germany loomed, its tale of a medieval Russian prince repelling Teutonic invaders was unmistakable wartime allegory, sanctioned at the highest levels of the Stalinist state.

Nikolai Cherkasov plays the heroic Nevsky with statuesque grandeur, but the film's enduring fame rests on its craft: the celebrated Battle on the Ice, a vast set piece of clashing armies on a frozen lake, and Eisenstein's pioneering fusion of image and Sergei Prokofiev's thunderous score. Director and composer worked so closely that the result became a foundational study in how music and montage can drive one another — analysed in film schools ever since.

Briefly suppressed when the Nazi-Soviet pact made its subject inconvenient, it was triumphantly reissued once Germany invaded. Its influence on the staging of screen battle — from Olivier's Henry V to countless epics since — is profound, and the Prokofiev cantata drawn from the score remains a concert-hall staple. Monumental, stirring and formally brilliant, it is Eisenstein's most accessible film and a landmark of historical spectacle. Eisenstein's writings on the sequence, analysing how visual rhythm and music interlock, remain required reading in film schools to this day. Reissued triumphantly once Germany invaded the Soviet Union, it became a rallying cry, and the Prokofiev cantata drawn from it endures in concert halls worldwide.