Seven Close Encounters

Jan Mattlach presents

Within a decade Bob Fosse shot two musicals that choreographically and musically reinvented the form of the genre, interconnecting an intricate storyline and the protagonists’ no less complicated inner worlds with musical dance passages. The autobiographical drama of a creator obsessed with his work, awarded the 1980 Palme d’Or at Cannes, was with fitting alacrity dubbed the musical equivalent of Fellini’s drama 8½.

Michal and Šimon Caban present

This bizarre spectacle, combining horror, rock opera, and an ostentatiously faked mise-en-scène à la gothic, was perceived in the Thatcher era as a parable with socio-critical overtones. Billy the Kid is a young cockney while demonic snooker champion Maxwell Randall is an unscrupulous predator – but here they symbolize a generational conflict or the struggle between good and evil.

Ivan Zachariáš presents

Even 40 years after this intense drama took five Academy Awards including Best Picture, it remains one of the most powerful films made about the Vietnam War. But in fact the director took his own route to making an action spectacular: he devotes only the middle part of his epically complex portrayal to the inferno of war, while the film’s remaining footage is split between the three friends before they are called up to serve in Vietnam and after they return. And the psychological and moral trauma they endure is just as painful as the physical maiming suffered by one of them.

Martin Krejčí presents

Lean’s supreme mastery as a film director is manifested in this monumental epic, principally in the way he blended a character study of an ambiguous hero with a portrayal of complex historical events. The opulent production design, the composition of the battle scenes, the mesmerizing shots of the desert, the acting performances and compelling music brought the film seven Academy Awards plus the distinction of a work whose splendour is equal to its underlying message.

Tono Stano presents

This wide-ranging fresco, set in the early Middle Ages and focusing on the love between a pious virgin and an unruly heathen from a marauding yeomen family, is both a unique reconstruction of a distant epoch and an ecstatic poem. The expressive modernist work, capitalizing on the film achievements of the 1960s, is a singular accomplishment in Czech and world cinema.

Marek Eben presents

It was not Allen’s sole attempt at serious matter, yet this dark and disturbing drama about a young man’s rise to the higher circles of London society is the first film he shot abroad. It shines for its well-paced plot and its precisely delineated characters, but the work is especially engaging for pondering the extent to which we are subject to a fateful temptation and how far we are willing to muzzle our consciences to gain an advantage.

Aleš Najbrt presents

Aki Kaurismäki’s style is immediately apparent. An economical approach and an ability – ostensibly employing the simplest means possible – to capture the essence of people and of life’s principal values. A flair for evoking an atmosphere in which melancholy blends with gentle irony. And this unconventional road movie documents the filmmaker’s penchant for his own perennial heroes and stories – diffident outsiders and their rarely fulfilled desire for happiness.