The Criterion Collection

Two French beggars, present-day pilgrims en route to Spain’s holy city of Santiago de Compostela, serve as narrators for an anticlerical history of heresy, told with absurdity and filled with images that rank among Luis Buñuel’s most memorable. A hotly debated work from cinema’s greatest skeptic.

A new priest arrives in a French country village to attend to his first parish, but after encountering immediate rejection, he relays his crisis of faith into his diary. Robert Bresson’s fourth film strips away all inessential aesthetic elements, exacting a purity of image and sound.