Blow-Up (1966)

Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 Palme d'Or winner is the film photographers argue about most. David Hemmings plays Thomas, a bored Swinging London fashion photographer partly modeled on David Bailey, who snaps a couple in a park and then enlarges the frames again and again until the grain seems to show a body in the bushes. Those darkroom scenes are the heart of it: a man trusting the print over his own eyes, then losing faith in both. Go in expecting mood and ambiguity rather than a mystery that resolves, and it becomes a sharp meditation on what a photograph can actually prove.