La Jetée

In a Paris driven underground after the Third World War, a prisoner is used as a subject in time travel experiments. He is chosen because of one very strong image from his childhood: a woman's face on the observation deck at Orly airport and a man dying. Chris Marker directed. It runs 28 minutes and is made almost entirely of photographs. There are only two brief moving sequences: about four seconds of her mouth opening, and twenty seconds later about six seconds of her eyes opening and blinking. The reason is not artistic but financial: Marker could only afford to rent a motion-picture camera for an afternoon. Its influence grew. Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys in 1995 draws on it directly. William Gibson named it as a major influence on his thinking. In 2012 the British Film Institute placed it 50th on its list of the greatest films ever made. Time magazine named it the top time-travel film in its 2010 ranking. Who it is for: viewers who like formal experiment and time travel taken philosophically. Who it is not for: anyone expecting moving images. It is told in still photographs from beginning to end, and that is deliberate.