Well, if i may meddle, for me the films that made me think and change permanently were Miike's Ichi the Killer and KWWong's Ashes of Time.
Not because of their plot, ideas or content but because they bend and invent their own rules in terms of cinematography and visuals. In this case it's more of a meta thing that made me thunk.
Miike is a mixture of knowledge in unorthodox photography and wing-it on-the-fly attitude in solutions to his busy filming schedule, while Wong uses many sequences based on old ideas and even ripped off at times (moving backgrounds, dynamic lighting, spinning cage from Macario) but teaming up with a sophisticated character like Mark Lee or a maverick savant like Christopher Doyle really potentiated said ideas into overdrive.
Ichi was my first exposure to this kind of camera work while Ashes was a heavily-condensed single dose of it.