Film of the Decade

The Battleship Potemkin (1925), Sergei Eisenstein's stunning Soviet classic, is one of the most innovative and influential films…

The Battleship Potemkin (1925), Sergei Eisenstein's stunning Soviet classic, is one of the most innovative and influential films in cinema history. Dealing with the mutiny of sailors on the Potemkin and its consequences, the film features an extraordinary set-piece in the celebrated Odessa Steps sequence, as civilians are massacred by Tsarist troops. (This brilliantly edited sequence was explicitly reworked by Brain De Palma in The Untouchables in 1986). Eisenstein's remarkable marriage of propaganda and art is charged with a startling energy and power, and for all cinema's subsequent technological advances, it endures as riveting viewing to this day.