This existential wail of a drama concerns two sisters, Karin and Maria, keeping vigil for a third, Agnes, who is dying of cancer and can find solace only in the arms of a beatific servant. An intensely felt film that is one of Bergman’s most striking formal experiments, Cries and Whispers is a powerful depiction of human behaviour in the face of death, positioned on the borders between reality and nightmare, tranquility and terror.

Returning exhausted from the Crusades to find medieval Sweden gripped by the Plague, a knight (Max von Sydow) suddenly comes face-to-face with the hooded figure of Death, and challenges him to a game of chess. One of the most influential films of its time, The Seventh Seal is a stunning allegory of man’s search for meaning and a work of stark visual poetry.

Autumn Sonata was the only collaboration between cinema’s two great Bergmans. Ingrid, playing an icy concert pianist, is matched beat for beat in ferocity by Liv Ullmann, as her eldest daughter. Over the course of a day and a long, painful night that the two spend together after an extended separation, they finally confront the bitter discord of their relationship. In The Piano Teacher, Michael Haneke finds his match in Isabelle Huppert, who delivers an icy but quietly seething performance as a piano professor at a Viennese conservatory who lives with her mother in a claustrophobically codepen­dent relation­ship.