2001: A Space Odyssey - Classic Film Pick

With his virtuosic adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's novel, Stanley Kubrick invented the modern science fiction film. That "2001: A Space Odyssey" has blown many audience members' minds to the point of causing them to walk out is a testament to Kubrick's distinctive vision that better reveals itself the more times you see the film. Part philosophical reverie, part social satire, and part sheer cinematic poetry, the story jumps from a pre-historic era when apes began using bones as tools, to a futuristic space-age when man discovers proof of intelligent alien life in the form of a gigantic black monolith on the moon. It is a pure film that eschews tropes like narration in favor of a poetic license that necessarily utilizes classical music as an inner-connecting emotional fabric upon which to balance its mesmerizing outer-space sequences. Kubrick fully embraces a less-is-more format to allow the viewer to interact with the film in the same way that scientists and astronomers work beyond the edges of their knowledge and imaginations to discover what lies beyond. "2001: A Space Odyssey" is a film that dares to admit that humans simultaneously comprehend nothing, and yet too much, about the power we hold to affect one another and the universe around us. Kubrick's multi-dimensional context is larger in scope, and yet more surgically focused, than any other film ever made.