There’s no film director I admire or enjoy more than Orson Welles. His ambition and talent were unmatched in their day, and he remains the most visionary and brilliant filmmaker in the history of the medium. No one understood better what movies were capable of, and when allowed to follow his muse, no one did it better. He wasn’t perfect, but he was Welles. At its worst, his work was fascinating. At its best, it was absolutely breathtaking. Here are my three favourites.

Mr. Arkadin — A mystery wrapped up in Welles’s fascination with art, ego, and a beautiful young woman. Criterion’s set has three different versions, and seeing what is the same and what is different in each gives you enormous insight into his methods. One of the DVD sets I value most in my collection.

Citizen Kane — Almost defies recommendation at this point, and yet still astonishingly watchable, entertaining and thought-provoking. Roger Ebert’s commentary track on the DVD is an essential (and free) film-school education. You probably know what Rosebud is, and yes, it means nothing, and it means everything.

F For Fake — To me, the absolutely essential Welles movie, again obsessed with art, ego, and a beautiful young woman. Part magic show and part auto-bee-ography (as he calls it), Welles somehow connects the dots between an art forger, Picasso, and his own amazing life. Criterion’s DVD set has epic extras.

There’s a moment in Winter’s Bone where Ree (played by the gifted Jennifer Lawrence, spooky in how completely she inhabits her character), the 17-year-old young woman that is the center of the movie, is teaching her younger brother and sister how to skin and gut squirrels. They live in the Ozarks on the edge of catastrophe (or perhaps just over it) in brutal, abject poverty, but Ree maintains her dignity and is trying her best to pass on lessons in how to stay alive in this world to her siblings. How to hunt, how to cook. When the boy, 12, pulls out the squirrel’s intestines as a mass of stomach-turning strings and viscera, he asks innocently “Do we eat this part?” Ree responds “Not yet,” in a deadpan, matter-of-fact manner that suggests volumes about the likely future of this family. It’s a key moment in a movie filled with nothing but, and I feel bad for spoiling it, but I had to pick one moment among the hundreds here that mark Winter’s Bone as one of the best films I’ve seen in the past twenty years, and that squirrel’s guts and Ree’s thoughts about them are haunting me hours after the movie ended.

I don’t want to delve much deeper into either the plot of Winter’s Bone or the brilliant, individual moments that carry it from beginning to end without a moment of fat or filler. It is one of those rare films that is so perfectly constructed and convincingly filmed that you not only can completely lose yourself inside its world, but you will, whether you intend to or not. It’s not flashy or trashy or spectacular or wild; it’s quiet and genuine and heart-breakingly real in its blasted-earth depiction of Ree’s life and the unfortunate circumstances that set her on the road to finding out what happened to her disappeared father, or else. It’s filled with unforgettable, nearly sui generis characters like the despotic hillbilly boss Thump, or Ree’s apparently uncaring uncle Teardrop, the brother of her missing father. Like nearly everyone else in the movie, Ree has no choice in what she must do, in every moment of every day of her life, or specifically when she is told that her family — she and her younger brother and sister and their hollowed-out, lost mother — must either find the missing head of their household, or move out, with absolutely nowhere to go and no hope whatsoever that things will ever get better.

So Winter’s Bone is in part a detective story, with Ree conducting a series of interviews that bring her closer and closer to a truth she knows she’d rather not learn. It’s partly a mob movie, as in the painful, impossible-to-look away sequence where two rival, rural families — connected but involved in a cold war for reasons that eventually come to light — meet in a barn in the middle of the night to discuss Ree’s violation of their codes and decide her fate.

Detective story, mob movie, meth-addled hayseed apocalypse; it’s all these things and none of them at the same time, whisper-quiet in its monumental power to drag you body and soul into Ree’s world and agonize along with her at the roads she must run down and the visceral, nightmarish horror that she eventually confronts, in the dark, on a small rowboat, with two women distantly related to her, as the deafening roar of a chainsaw decides the rest of her life. I’m telling you nothing at all about the movie in telling you this, but I am telling you it’s a moment you’ll always remember in a film you’ll carry with you long after it is over. Winter’s Bone is one of the best mystery movies I’ve ever seen, one of the best rural dramas ever filmed, one of the most horrific horror stories in years. That it sets out to be none of these, that it’s just a mundane story about a down-on-their-luck family whose dad made a mistake, makes it all the more extraordinary.