What are the best historical films?

The great Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, who died in 2007, was born on July 14th, 1918.

His most famous film, The Seventh Seal is a brilliant, much parodied meditation on the immanence of death. Set in plague-ridden medieval Sweden, it is also one of the best films with a historical setting ever made. Bergman produced a number of other historically aware films such as The Virgin Spring and concluded his extraordinary career with the Oscar-winning Fanny and Alexander, an epic, uncharacteristically exuberant examination of bourgeois life in 19th-century Sweden.

Bergman was a huge influence on the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose film Mirror mingles one child’s personal history with that of the Soviet Union to produce what is arguably the greatest historical film of all time, certainly the most visually striking, though other contenders include Tarkovsky’s earlier creations, Ivan’s Childhood (about a young boy who becomes involved with Soviet partisans during the Second World War) and Andrei Rublev, a vast canvas-like biography of the eponymous icon painter.

Here are my top 10 historical films. Do you agree with them? Let us know your suggestions in the comments.

1. Mirror (Andrei Takovsky, 1975, USSR)

2. Lancelot du Lac (Robert Bresson, 1974, France)

3. A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946, UK)

4. Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985, USSR)

5. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1969, Italy/US)

6. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966, USSR)

7. A Canterbury Tale (Powell and Pressburger, 1944, UK)

8. La Reine Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1994, France)

9. The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957, Sweden)

10. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980, West Germany)