Roger Ebert called the film Bresson’s “finest prayer." Other Bresson films have been more dramatic, more exciting and more viscerally involving—for me, personally, A Man Escaped—but none more spiritually. Balthazar stands apart in its moral and spiritual rigor.

A gleaming android stares mechanically at the viewer, its round, lidless eyes glowing with the light of some unexplained inner mechanism. A subterranean city peopled by the poor, ruled by a totalitarian state above. A wild-haired scientist bedecked in a white lab coat works feverishly at the controls of some mysterious apparatus…