Stalker

Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker opened in 1979, the result of a famously catastrophic two-year shoot during which the original footage was destroyed by a Mosfilm laboratory error and most of the film had to be re-shot from scratch. The principal photography was conducted near a chemical plant on the Tallinn-Narva road in the Estonian SSR; several members of the crew, including Tarkovsky and his wife Larisa, would later die of cancers commonly attributed to the location's contamination. Stalker is permanently in the upper tier of every Sight & Sound poll.

A guide known only as the Stalker (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky) leads two men (the cynical Writer and the rationalist Professor (Anatoly Solonitsyn and Nikolai Grinko, both Tarkovsky regulars)) into the Zone, a restricted area surrounding an unspecified disaster, where a Room is rumoured to grant the visitor's deepest unspoken wish. The journey itself, conducted in long static takes through ruined industrial landscapes flooded with water, and the long conversations on the threshold of the Room, are the film's substance. Adapted from the Strugatsky brothers' novel Roadside Picnic, with the brothers writing the screenplay.

The film's three protagonists (faith, science, art) articulate the central question Tarkovsky was working with for the last decade of his life: what does one actually want, and what does it cost to ask the question honestly. The transition from sepia to colour as the men cross into the Zone is one of the most-cited formal moments in cinema. Geoff Dyer wrote a celebrated book-length essay on a single viewing.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most patient masterpiece in late-Soviet cinema, and Tarkovsky at his most metaphysically charged. A film that operates outside the time-economy most cinema accepts, and rewards every minute.