France

• Orpheus

The story of Orpheus's trip to the Underworld to reclaim his wife. Eurydice has never been more stunningly told than in Jean Cocteau's modernised version, in which Hell is a bomb-damaged wasteland and Death a darkly mocking princess with sinister motorcyclists as her emissaries. The film lends itself to a variety of meanings and, with its dreamlike passions and fantasies, is a marvellous experience because of the manner in which they have been expressed. Outside the animated cartoon there have been few films so visually inventive. Beyond the parallels with the old Greek myth you may just forget what it is about; but you will never forget the images, as impressive now as they were when this film caught the world's imagination in 1950.