Alexander Nevsky - Sergei Eisenstein, 1938
I chose Alexander Nevsky because it’s such a Russian film. I should also have added Battleship Potemkin to this list because my family left Odessa (we're from Odessa, on my father's side) just after Potemkin, which was this war boat, attacked the port of Odessa because of the people's revolt against the Empire. My family moved to New York about five years later. So that film is actually almost biographical for my family, but it's not my favourite of his. Also of course, there’s the way Eisenstein used music. There aren't lots of great films which align music and vision in a really exciting and intelligent way and Eisenstein did that. Of course, he had a great composer like Prokofiev to help him.