After a decade of battling in the Crusades, a knight challenges Death to a fateful game of chess. The Seventh Seal launched the international career of its director, Ingmar Bergman, and made a star of its 27-year-old leading actor, Max Von Sydow. Forty years later, Bergman's stunning allegory of man's apocalyptic search for meaning remains a textbook on the art of filmmaking and an essential building block in any collection.