Mark Le Fanu

As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in Belorussia, teenage Flyora eagerly joins the Soviet resistance. Rather than the adventure and glory he envisioned, what he finds is a waking nightmare of unimaginable carnage and cruelty. Nearly blocked from being made by Soviet censors, who took seven years to approve its script, is perhaps the most visceral, impossible-to-forget antiwar film ever made.

At once a rousing paean to artistic creation, a delicate evocation of divine grace, and the ultimate film about food, the Oscar-winning Babette's Feast is a layered tale of a French housekeeper with a mysterious past who brings quiet revolution in the form of one exquisite meal to a circle of starkly pious villagers in late nineteenth-century Denmark.