10 Movies To Challenge Even The Most Hardcore Film Buff

5. The Mirror

British writer Will Self once described Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror as the most beautiful film ever made, and it's hard to argue with him - sumptuously shot, as an exploration of memories and emotions spanning three periods of life, this deeply personal autobiographical work is a masterpiece of "pure cinema", in which conventional form is subsumed beneath stirring imagery and evocative narration. That said, at the time of its release, others dismissed the film as "incomprehensible", a charge which many audiences are likely to agree with. Tarkovsky has never been a director interested in pandering to the lowest common denominator to achieve popularity, his works often intellectually and philosophically rigorous explorations of deep themes. The Mirror is something of a stream of consciousness film, far more preoccupied with the transient nature of memory and the past than it is with telling a coherent story. A difficult movie to take in, The Mirror is one which requires the viewer to switch off their preconceptions as to what the function of cinema is - much in the same way the modernist writers of the early 20th century such as James Joyce and Marcel Proust redefined the written word, so too does Tarkovsky ask the viewer to reconsider the form and function of the moving image. The result is spellbinding.