An art-house circuit sensation, this feature-length documentary is visually arresting and possesses a clear, pro-environmental political agenda. Without a story, dialogue, or characters, Koyaanisqatsi (1983) (the film's title is a Hopi word roughly translated into English as "life out of balance") is composed of nature imagery, manipulated in slow ...
Fledging director Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dali create this ultimate surrealist film, which is essentially a barrage of striking and irrational images designed to shock and provoke. During the course of the film, we witness a close-up of a woman's eye being slashed open with a razor; a man dragging a piano, two bishops, and a pair of ...
A post-apocalyptic future becomes the setting for pitch black humor in this visually intricate French comedy. The action takes place within a single apartment complex, which is owned by the same man that operates the downstairs butcher shop. It's a particularly popular place to live, thanks to the butcher's uncanny ability to find excellent cuts ...
Named after a Sufi word that translates roughly as "breath of life" or "blessing," Baraka is Ron Fricke's impressive follow-up to Godfrey Reggio's non-verbal documentary film Koyaanisqatsi. Fricke was cinematographer and collaborator on Reggio's film, and for Baraka he struck out on his own to polish and expand the photographic techniques used on ...
A extended conversation between two old friends over dinner proves an unexpectedly fascinating subject for a film in the critically acclaimed My Dinner with André. The talkers in question are André Gregory, a renowned experimental theater director, and playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, both of whom play themselves. The film is not a documentary, ...
A "metaphysical splatter film" that was praised by Susan Sontag as "one of the 10 most important films of modern times," Begotten is a very grainy, often powerful work of experimental cinema which seems to land somewhere between David Lynch's surreal Eraserhead and James Broughton's heavily symbolic Dreamwood. The film opens with God Killing ...
Five years after the critical and commercial disappointment of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, director David Lynch returned to the big screen with this cryptic thriller about confused identities and erotic obsession. Fred (Bill Pullman) is an avant-garde jazz saxophonist who shares a luxurious but fashionably barren house with his wife Renee ...
Renegade filmmaker and noted aficionado of expressive bad taste John Waters exploded into international infamy with this darkly comic, no-budget parade of the perverse (his third feature film, and first in color), in which plus-size cross-dresser Divine stars as Babs Johnson, a flashy criminal on the lam from the FBI who is hiding out in a trailer ...
In 2005 a number of provocative, award-winning ads appeared that touted the Helvetica font; Gary Hustwit explores the subject protractedly with his feature-length essay film Helvetica. The documentary, produced in 2007 (and thus commemorating the typeface's 50th anniversary) uses the omnipresent font as a lens, through which it examines ...
Divine was touring as a cabaret singer when director John Waters made this comedy of the grotesque, but he filled the void admirably with the equally rotund Jean Hill and burlesque-queen Liz Renay. The film tells the story of Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole), a mad housewife who kills her husband then goes on the lam with her 300-pound maid Grizelda ...
Circus horrors cross over into the mundane world in this terrifying, psychedelic film from Alejandro Jodorowsky, the man who brought you the infamous El Topo. Fenix (Adan Jodorowsky, the director's son) is the son of a circus strongman (Guy Stockwell) and an aerialist (Blanca Guerra). One night, the mother sees from her high perspective that her ...
Director Sergei Paradjanov made a practice of making highly idiosyncratic films based on the folklore of regions in the former Soviet Union. In 1969 he made this film, based in part on the life of the 18th-century Armenian poet, Sayat Nova ('The King of Song'). Renowned for his writings and his religious lifestyle, Sayat Nova became a martyr when ...
Powaqqatsi was the second of the feature-length "non narrative" films produced, directed and co-scripted by Godfrey Reggio. As in his earlier Koyaanisqatsi, Reggio utilizes a collage of sounds and gimmicked-up images to make a comment on modern life. And as in the earlier film, Reggio's onslaught of imagery is backed up by the music of Philip ...
Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov broke boundaries with his dreamlike vision of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russian Ark. It's the first feature-length narrative film shot in a single take (on digital video, using a specially designed disc instead of tape). Russian Ark is shot from the point-of-view of an unseen narrator, as he explores the ...
Bearing the same relationship to The Muppet Show that Fritz the Cat does to Felix the Cat, Meet the Feebles is a gleefully rude, decidedly adult comedy about the backstage goings-on amongst an eccentric group of puppets the day before their televised variety special. Made by director Peter Jackson, creator of Bad Taste and Heavenly Creatures, the ...
While Umberto Lenzi began the Italian-made cycle of brutal Amazonian cannibal horrors with Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio and effectively ended it with the nauseating Cannibal Ferox, it was Ruggero Deodato who directed the subgenre's most enduring film. This popular bloodbath features a fetus ripped from a woman's body, people impaled on spikes, a ...
A riotously funny bad-taste epic from director John Waters, Baltimore's "Prince of Puke," this sick classic tells the depraved life story of obese criminal Dawn Davenport (Divine), from her bad-girl youth as a go-go dancer on Baltimore's infamous Block to her death in the electric chair. Mink Stole is terrific as Dawn's bratty daughter Taffy, ...
Legendary French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once again poses a number of provocative questions about art, politics, and the nexus point between them in this drama in three acts, "Hell," "Purgatory," and "Paradise." After a collage of film clips illustrate a meditation on the nature of war and conflict in society, Godard introduces his central set ...
In the aftermath of the tragedies on September 11, 2001, the French film company Studio Canal called upon a group of filmmakers, representing various regions of the world, to address the scope of the situation in however broad or intimate a context as they saw fit. The one guideline they were given was that no one film could exceed 11 minutes, ...
David Lynch's prequel to his cult television series "Twin Peaks" concerns the last seven days in the life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), whose plastic-wrapped corpse, found floating in a river, was the fulcrum for the television series. During the day in the town of Twin Peaks, Laura is a top honors student at the local high school. By night, she ...
Notorious schlock and psychotronic production company Troma (known for such classics as Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke 'Em High) hails Tromeo and Juliet, its contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare's love tragedy, a "thrill-a-minute, body-piercing, computer sex, sapphic, car-crashing extravaganza." Set in New York City, the tale centers on the ...
This cinematic/literary hybrid fuses motifs from Beat writer William S. Burroughs's novel of the same name with elements of the author's biography and plenty of the cerebral alienation and biomorphic special effects fans of creepy cult director David Cronenberg have come to expect. Bill Lee (Peter Weller) wants to write, but he exterminates bugs ...
This twisted black comedy is obsessed in turn with swans, twins, and decay. Alba Bewick (Andréa Ferréol) is involved in a swan-related car accident near the zoo. The accident kills two other women, the wives of two twin zoologists, Oliver and Oswald Deuce (Brian and Eric Deacon). Alba is lucky enough to escape with one leg. Eventually her doctor ...
Jean Genet, the novelist, playwright, political activist and gadfly who became a (literal) outlaw literary hero in France, directed his first and only film in this notorious silent short subject. Set in a French prison, Un Chant D'amour explores the crushing loneliness and thwarted desires of men behind bars, as well as the sadistic impulses of ...
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