Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman directed this film in 1957, and its unforgettable, almost instantly iconic plot and images – about a medieval knight who plays chess with Death – did as much as Italy’s Federico Fellini to launch the international arthouse cinema movement. Woody Allen had great fun making fun of The Seventh Seal in Love and Death and elsewhere, but adored Bergman and the film. It’s always worth a look, and even more so right now, because, in this movie, Death is wandering around, and quite busy, because the world is in the midst of a deadly bubonic plague.

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