A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow. Her chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son—and turning the occasional trick. Recently named #1 on the BFI’s Sight & Sound 100 Greatest Films list (compiled every 10 years), this film is the first directed by a woman to be ranked at the top in the survey’s 70-year history.

In its enormous spareness, Jeanne Dielman seems simple, but the film encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, this drama is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades.

“A defining classic of post-modern art-house filmmaking....” —Chron