skopia
Keaton did every stunt himself and dropped a real locomotive through a burning bridge: it flopped, cost him his independence within two years, and is now considered the great silent comedy.
The first Iranian film to win the foreign language Oscar: Farhadi built a moral maze where every person is partly right, and you will change sides several times.
Kiarostami blurred documentary and fiction so completely that nobody has quite untangled it since: a man caught impersonating a director, with everyone involved playing themselves on camera.
Councils across Britain banned it and Norway would not show it at all: the Pythons went after zealotry rather than faith, which is exactly why it still works.
Bigelow made war feel like an addiction rather than a duty: a bomb disposal sergeant works without much fear, and every defusal is stretched until the room turns physical.
The outdoors has never felt this hostile on film: Boorman shot in sequence and made his actors run the whitewater themselves, and a weekend canoe trip turns into something much older.
The CIA really did produce a fake science fiction movie to get six Americans out of Tehran, and kept it classified until 1997: Affleck plays the operation completely straight.
Russell shot it on bleached film stock so the desert looks radioactive: four American soldiers go looking for Kuwaiti gold in the days after the Gulf War stops, carrying a stolen map.
A Paris cinema showing it was firebombed and Scorsese needed years to get it financed: Christ imagined as someone who could refuse, with Peter Gabriel's score sounding like the actual Middle East.