Canter Bridge

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Brilliantly conceived, movingly enacted, grandiose in scope, this epic fiction intertwines the life of the miserable but gifted Mozart with the envious, correct, but ultimately mediocre Antonio Salieri. The result is a showcase of cinematic talent set to the score of some of Mozart’s finest music.

Though recent Mozart scholarship tends to rehabilitate the man’s reputation and distance him from the film’s wildly eccentric bacchanal who ended up dumped in a paupers’ common grave and mourned by few, the narrative path of this film is—apart from its dubious historical warrant—the product of genius.

The scene where a dying Mozart dictates his Requiem to Albinoni is zany and impossible, yet still an adrenaline-pumping piece of dramatic fiction and one of the film’s proudest moments.

All eight of this film’s Oscars were well earned.