Andrei Tarkovsky's "The Mirror"

In a post-Soviet era, Andrei Tarkovsky emerged as one of the premier film directors in Russia that challenged the status quo of modern filmmaking and focused on stirring an emotion or memory through his visual storytelling.

Often credited as being one of Stanley Kubrick's most central influences, Tarkovsky's direction and filmography sculpts a dream-like landscape familiar to any viewer, yet unsettling enough to engage the child-like curiosity of our imaginations. Within "The Mirror", the film's unorthodox assembly of seemingly unrelated scenes, challenges the viewer to seek more than just an easily structured plot and engage in the hauntingly beautiful sequences of human life and nature.

Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai"

Often heralded in the canon of cinema's greatest films to ever exist, Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" is a story set in medieval Japan, where a rag-tag band of seven unrelated warriors unites to protect an innocent village from the threat of an invading army of raiders. Seven warriors, each with distinct personalities, backgrounds, and motivations, must first overcome their differences and consolidate to become the village's only hope of defeating evil. In a film composed in black and white, Kurosawa is still able to colorfully blend the elements of dramatic visual storytelling through the use of nature and emotion, the rise of an unlikely hero, and vivid cinematography.

And plus, who doesn't like a film with samurai?

David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia"

This film was one of the first movies that I had watched, where I literally said to myself, "That shot right there, is a goddamn work of art", and inspired me to learn all about the composition of a scene and how a cinematographer can devise a shot to enhance the feel/structure of the narrative. In David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia", the film was one of the first in the industry to be filmed with "Super Panavision" lenses - meaning that these super wide angled shots impressively displayed the natural landscape of the desert with a stunning beauty that movie-goers would never have had the pleasure of experiencing until then. In brilliant sequences of long-takes, quick cuts, and cohesive editing (along with an epic score to match the epic elegance of the natural world), "Lawrence of Arabia" is a film that even left muted, would classify as a stunning piece of art in its cinematography alone.