Three Colours: Blue

Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours: Blue won the Golden Lion and Best Actress (Juliette Binoche) at Venice in 1993, opening the trilogy that would close his career. The trilogy (Blue, White, Red) is themed on the colours of the French flag and the French Republic's three principles: liberty, equality, fraternity. Blue takes liberty as its subject and produces what is widely considered the most emotionally intense entry of the three.

Julie (Juliette Binoche, in one of the great central performances of the 1990s) survives the car crash that kills her composer husband and their young daughter. Her response is to attempt to strip her life of every attachment (to abandon the apartment, the manuscript of her husband's unfinished European Anthem, the lover who tries to comfort her) and live as a nobody in a Paris flat where no one knows her past. The film follows her gradual, reluctant return to connection: through the discovery of her husband's mistress, through music she finds herself unable to refuse, through small acts of accidental human contact.

Sławomir Idziak's deep-blue photography, Zbigniew Preisner's score (with the European Anthem playing throughout in fragments), and Binoche's almost dialogue-free performance combine into one of the most precisely constructed grief films in cinema. The scene in the swimming pool (Julie weeping under blue light) is among Kieślowski's most-cited sequences.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most emotionally exact film about widowhood in modern European cinema, and Binoche at her most concentrated. Foundational to Kieślowski's late-career masterpiece trilogy.