Planet of the Apes

Essential, and one of the few films whose final shot is so well known that people who have never seen it can describe it. If you are among them, the surprise is gone and the film is still worth two hours, because the reveal was never the point: the hour before it is a courtroom drama about a scientific establishment that cannot allow a piece of evidence to be true.

The adaptation is more radical than it looks. Pierre Boulle's novel has an advanced ape civilisation with cars and aircraft, which was unaffordable, so the production moved it to a pre-industrial society built out of rock and rope. The constraint produced the film's best quality, which is that this world looks entirely unlike anywhere else and entirely coherent with itself.

Two craft decisions carry it. John Chambers' prosthetics let performers act through the face, which had never been achieved at this level, and the budget for them was so large that it dictated almost everything else. And Jerry Goldsmith's score is close to unlistenable on purpose, built out of percussion, bowed instruments played wrongly and horns that sound like animals, and it is the thing that makes an afternoon in a quarry feel like another world.

Heston is doing something genuinely odd here: Taylor is a misanthrope who left Earth because he despised people, so the film's human lead spends most of it agreeing with the apes about humanity. Nothing else in the series needs to be seen. This stands alone completely.