Solaris

Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris opened in 1972 and won the Grand Prix Special du Jury at Cannes that year. Adapted from Stanisław Lem's 1961 Polish novel of the same name, the film was Tarkovsky's third feature after Ivan's Childhood and Andrei Rublev, and was widely positioned at the time as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a comparison Tarkovsky himself disliked, since his interest was in inner space rather than outer.

The psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) travels to a Soviet space station orbiting the planet Solaris, whose ocean-surface has begun materialising visitors from the crew's deepest memories. Kelvin's dead wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk, whose performance is the film's emotional centre) appears in his cabin, fully embodied, with no memory of how she got there. The remaining crew (the cynical Snaut (Jüri Järvet) and the haunted Sartorius (Anatoly Solonitsyn)) have made their own accommodations with their visitors. The question the film asks, with a patience the genre rarely allows, is whether one can love the materialisation of one's love.

Eduard Artemyev's electronic score, the famous opening on Earth (rain on plants, leaves underwater, a horse walking through grass), and the closing return to Kelvin's father's cottage (built on a flotation pad inside the ocean of Solaris) are among the most-cited sequences in the medium. Steven Soderbergh's 2002 remake is respectable; Tarkovsky's is irreplaceable.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The greatest science-fiction love story ever filmed, and one of Tarkovsky's most accessible masterpieces. The library scene alone justifies it.