The Trial

Orson Welles considered The Trial (1962) the best film he ever made, and his adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel of bureaucratic nightmare is among his most visually overwhelming works. Made in European exile on a patchwork budget, it found Welles improvising grandeur from limitation — most famously by shooting in the cavernous, abandoned Gare d'Orsay in Paris.

Anthony Perkins, fresh from Psycho, plays Josef K., the man arrested for an unspecified crime, with Welles himself as the imperious Advocate, Romy Schneider and Jeanne Moreau among the women who drift through the labyrinth. Welles renders Kafka's world through vast, distorting spaces, oppressive low angles and a relentless forward momentum, conjuring a totalitarian dreamscape that feels both timeless and pointedly modern in its vision of the individual crushed by faceless systems.

Divisive on release — some found it overwrought — the film has grown in stature as one of the great literary adaptations and a high point of Welles's restless late period. Its architecture of paranoia influenced everything from Brazil to countless dystopian visions since. Bold, claustrophobic and formally astonishing, The Trial is Welles wrestling Kafka onto the screen with all the audacity at his command. Restored prints have allowed new audiences to discover its towering architecture of paranoia, and its standing has risen sharply among Welles's admirers. Its architecture of dread fed directly into later dystopian visions, from Brazil to a host of films about the individual lost in the machine.