Going Medieval: 25 films to watch while waiting for Game of Thrones season 8

15) The Seventh Seal (1957)

Masterpiece time! Perhaps legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman‘s finest film, The Seventh Seal stars the youthful Max Von Sydow (Game of Thrones’ Three-eyed Raven) in an epic historical fantasy considered a classic of world cinema and one of the greatest films of all time.

Von Sydow plays an exhausted knight returning home from the Crusades (a familiar theme on this list) who finds his beloved Sweden in the grip of the Black Death. Death himself appears in the form of a man, announcing that the knight’s time to die has arrived. The knight suggests playing a game of chess for his life, and Death accepts the challenge. As the game unfolds, the knight and Death converse about the meaning of life.

Upon its release, The Seventh Seal took something of a critical drubbing in Sweden, but also won the 1957 Jury’s Special Prize at Cannes. Eventually, the movie became widely accepted as one of greats, including by Roger Ebert, who recognized how it breaks with movies made today. “Long considered one of the masterpieces of cinema, it is now a little embarrassing to some viewers, with its stark imagery and its uncompromising subject, which is no less than the absence of God. Films are no longer concerned with the silence of God but with the chattering of men.”

The Seventh Seal is one of those films that asks you to take the journey with it, to dig deep into its symbolism and allegory to glean what meaning you can. You may feel like you’re familiar with it even though you haven’t seen the movie because its iconic look and theme are so often imitated and parodied. It’s a darling of Rotten Tomatoes, pulling in a score of 92% and an audience score of 93%.