The Seventh Seal (1957)

  This might seem like a daunting movie to watch.  It's black and white, Swedish, with a loosely connected set of characters set in the Middle Ages during the Black Plague.  If you read that sentence and thought "Yikes," hold on.  It is absolutely worth watching and not just because it inspired the character Death from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

A lord (Max von Sydow) returns from the Crusades bitter and disillusioned, trying to get back to his lands and wife (Inga Landgre), only to be confronted by Death (Bengt Ekerot).  To buy time, the lord challenges Death to a chess game, drawing it out over the time it takes to return home.  Along the way, he and his even more bitter and disillusioned squire (Gunnar Bjornstrand) meet a handful of people trying to live under the specter of the plague.

It's almost a Canterbury Tales kind of movie, but without the nested stories, and a beautiful meditation on how people cope with the uncertainty of life.  Von Sydow has never been young, not ever, but he is always magnetic.  Ekerot is by turns sympathetic and cruel and the pair's banter is what makes the movie.  Most of the rest of the characters are one-note archetypes but the story is an allegory anyway so it doesn't matter.

The Seventh Seal is pretty much essential for any cinephile, if only because it inspired so many other films, art, and music.  If you can, it's streaming on the Criterion Channel.