My Golden Fifty boiled down into a Diamond Dozen

A list comprised solely of works that I consider both masterpieces and personal favorites.
It’s a selection that formed over many years, a fifty-fifty deal between variety and sincere judgment.

My reasons (first the obvious ones, then the idiosyncratic):

Persona: pure cinema. I watched it once late at night and then again first thing in the morning, and it was like seeing another film because I felt I had grown substantially as a human in the meantime. | Andrei Rublev: among other things, it is the cinema’s most sublime epic masterpiece; there never was and never will be anything like it. | The Passion of...