Andrei Rublev

Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev was completed in 1966, immediately suppressed by Soviet authorities, screened at Cannes in 1969 in a heavily censored single press showing, and not properly released in the USSR until 1971. The 205-minute director's cut became available only after the fall of the Soviet Union. Tarkovsky was thirty-four when he made it; it was his second feature, and it announced one of the most distinctive sensibilities in world cinema.

Loosely tracing the life of the fifteenth-century icon painter, the film moves across eight episodes spanning twenty-five years of medieval Russian history, Tatar raids, peasant rebellions, religious doubt, the casting of an enormous bell. Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn, in the first of his many Tarkovsky collaborations) is often a passive witness: violence, suffering and the question of whether one can create beauty in a brutal world unfold around him. The famous final colour sequence (a slow tour of Rublev's surviving icons, after three hours of monochrome) is among the most moving codas in cinema.

Critics including Ingmar Bergman placed Tarkovsky among the greatest directors of his generation on the strength of this single film; Andrei Rublev sits permanently in the top tier of every Sight & Sound poll. Its influence on filmmakers from Béla Tarr to Terrence Malick is incalculable.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The film that proved the cinema could equal painting and theology in seriousness. Demanding, monumental, and irreplaceable in the canon of works that ask what art is for in a violent world.