Breaking the Waves: No 24 best arthouse film of all time

All the ingredients that have come to define Lars von Trier's career (and in turn, much of modern European cinema) are present here: high-wire acting, innovative visual techniques, a suffering heroine, issue-grappling drama, and a galvanising shot of controversy to make the whole thing unmissable. He's repeated the formula many times since, but here, in his breakthrough film, it was unfamiliar, and moved many a viewer to either tears or outrage, or both. As usual, von Trier cuts to the heart of the matter, with a story in which sex and spirituality, and faith and madness, collide. The setting is an insular, pious Scottish fishing village, where the marriage of simple-hearted Bess (Emily Watson) to a Scandinavian oil worker (Stellan Skarsgård) sets her up for a wrenching test of faith and devotion. Bess's sexual degradation – ostensibly at the behest of her bedridden husband – steadily makes a sacrificial victim of her. Is she a saint or just a deluded sinner? As usual, von Trier takes things to extremes without quite losing his audience and even if some viewers might find Bess's humiliation sadistically distasteful, no one could deny the power of Emily Watson's performance.