MOVIES I LOVE

Over the past decade, Paul Verhoeven's Elle has steadily ascended my personal pantheon of cinema, solidifying its place among my top ten greatest films of all time.

At first glance, Elle confronts the viewer with an unflinching depiction of trauma: a promiscuous woman is raped in the opening scene, her detached cat observing indifferently from the sidelines. Yet, as the film unfolds, it reveals itself as a profoundly layered exploration of agency, resilience, and the refusal to be defined by victimhood. The protagonist, Michèle, carries the weight of a harrowing childhood—her father, a notorious serial killer, burned his victims, and the tabloids framed her as a complicit figure in his crimes. Labeled a monster by society, she absorbs this condemnation and channels it, becoming the hardened, enigmatic woman the world seems to expect.

What makes Elle so extraordinary is its depiction of transformation. Over the course of the narrative, Michèle’s arc subtly dismantles the very identity imposed upon her. She begins to see through the moral binaries of victim and monster, breaking the generational cycle of violence that shaped her life. This is a story not just of survival but of transcendence—a meditation on redemption for those society has all but written off.

Verhoeven crafts a provocative, deeply human tale that dares to wrestle with complexity rather than settle for comforting conclusions. Elle is as much about confronting personal demons as it is about reclaiming power—and in the process, it becomes one of the most potent films about breaking free from the chains of inherited darkness. And did I mention it’s a Christmas movie!

In a previous review of The Blair Witch Project, I claimed that no other found-footage film could rival the one that started it all. That was before I saw The Taking of Deborah Logan. This film doesn’t just challenge that notion; it shatters it. It stands as one of the most terrifying films of all time, deserving a spot alongside the giants of the genre.

What I’ve always believed separates great horror from the rest is its ability to tap into something deeply primal. Whether it's Jaws exploiting our fear of being lower on the food chain, or The Exorcist provoking the unsettling thought, “What if everything in the Bible is real and there’s a cosmic battle between good and evil?”—these films dig into fears that are elemental, almost instinctual.

The Taking of Deborah Logan may, on the surface, be about an ancient possession, but at its core, it’s about something far more terrifying: Alzheimer’s. This disease runs in my family, and there’s no fear more primal than the slow, cruel erosion of memory. The horror of watching someone you love—someone who once looked at you with recognition and warmth—become a stranger.

This film helped me confront some deeply complex emotions surrounding Alzheimer’s, but it’s not an easy watch. For those who have lived through this particular torture, I’d offer a strong trigger warning—it brings to the surface fears that hit far too close to home.

As someone who has worked with emerging technology and writes horror films, I’m always grappling with the question: how can technology be truly terrifying? Often, I find that it isn’t, at least not in the primal sense that horror demands. Sure, there are films that have cracked the code—Pulse managed it, and certain episodes of Black Mirror effectively tap into modern anxieties. But for every success, there are countless misfires.

Influencer, however, comes surprisingly close to solving this dilemma. The film doesn’t just focus on technology as a tool but weaponizes it in a way that feels disturbingly plausible. The protagonist, marked by her unsettling birthmark, wields her technological prowess with such skill that it becomes the very source of fear. Her ability to take over people’s accounts, manipulate their identities, drain their bank accounts, and seamlessly move on to the next victim reflects a terrifying reality—one where existence is validated by nothing more than an Instagram update from a tropical beach. As long as you’re still posting, you’re still alive.

What makes Influencer stand out is how it uses this slick, modern thriller framework to explore a killer’s personal, envious motivations, all written on her face but never explicitly addressed in the plot. The film offers a glimpse into a near future where digital facades and curated lives are the norm, and with just a few keystrokes, anyone can become whoever they want—artist, writer, influencer, or even someone else entirely. It's a chilling reminder that the technology we casually use today could become the very thing that erases us tomorrow.

The brilliance and unsettling force that propels Tár is this: what if we framed a #MeToo narrative not from the perspective of the victim, but from the viewpoint of the person being canceled? This inversion is where the film’s true genius lies. It forces us inside the carefully constructed kingdom of Lydia Tár, a composer who has amassed power and influence, using it to devour admirers, elevate them to lovers, then discard them with impunity. She reigns supreme, able to crush the careers of anyone who dares challenge her or falls out of favor.

In this dominion, Tár wields her intellect like a weapon, effortlessly dismantling and belittling her students, treating them as mere pawns, lucky to even occupy the same space as her. Yet, as with all kingdoms ruled by fear, the subjects eventually revolt. Once Tár crosses the line by breaking her final protégé, her once-loyal subjects rise up, eager for blood, dragging her down from the heights of her prestigious career to the humiliating role of composer for Monster Hunter.

Todd Field’s film deftly exposes the mechanics of modern cancel culture—how even the most powerful can be toppled, though never completely destroyed. The real irony, and perhaps tragedy, is that in the capitalist circus, there is always a safety net. Even as Tár falls from grace, the system ensures she lands somewhere, though it may be as a diminished version of her former self—a clown in the circus she once ruled.

For years, I’ve wondered aloud, “Where’s the female Tarantino?” Sure, we’ve had great female directors, like Penny Marshall and Jane Campion, but where’s the director willing to go totally off the rails, unapologetically spilling blood and guts with the kind of chaotic glee that Tarantino brings to the table?

Well, Coralie Fargeat and Julia Ducournau seem to have heard the call. This movie is bonkers—so bonkers, in fact, that you could chop 20 minutes off the ending and people would still be buzzing about the carnage. Movies haven’t gone this full-on gonzo since Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive. The final act hits historic levels of gore, but some folks are missing the deeper cut.

A lot of reviews focus on the split between Sue and Elizabeth, as if they’re two completely different minds. Nope! The film’s point is way more interesting: it’s a metaphor for self-hatred—the younger you cringing at the older you, while the older you is embarrassed by your younger self.

Then there’s the scene where our protagonist processes the casting agent’s remark—Too bad she didn’t have those tits on her face'—and turns it into literal, Lynchian horror. It’s darkly hilarious but tragically spot-on. It shows how women are often shackled to what men think they should be.

Society of the Snow delves into the darkest, most unsettling chapter of the 1972 tragedy that befell the Uruguayan rugby team when their plane, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, crashed in the Andes. What sets this film apart is its deeply haunting twist—it is narrated by Numa Turcatti, a member of the ill-fated flight who did not survive. He isn’t just any narrator, though. He was a soccer player who had to learn how to pass the ball, a metaphor that quietly underscores the tragic, selfless role he would come to play in the survivors' journey.

As the film moves through the unbearable trials of the crash, the relentless avalanches, and the brutal cold of the Andes, Turcatti reveals that he was the last to die—his body, consumed by the remaining survivors, provided them with the literal fuel needed to make the grueling trek through the mountains, which ultimately led to their rescue. The narrative choice to have a dead man recount the story of his own death and his posthumous sacrifice creates a profound meditation on mortality, survival, and the staggering complexity of human endurance.

J.A. Bayona, no stranger to disaster cinema, masterfully reframes cannibalism—a horrifying act under normal circumstances—as a necessary and even poignant sacrifice. In his hands, the concept becomes less about the grotesque and more about the beauty of human resilience and the ultimate price of survival. The film is sad and emotionally wrenching, pushing its characters—and the audience—to confront the very limits of human morality and existence.

In Society of the Snow, Bayona crafts not just a survival story but a haunting reflection on sacrifice, elevating a harrowing historical event into something that forces us to rethink what it truly means to live, to die, and to endure.

The Last Duel is Ridley Scott’s masterstroke in narrative complexity, echoing the structure of Kurosawa’s Rashomon by retelling the same events from three distinct perspectives. This ambitious approach poses a unique challenge: how does a filmmaker restart the story every thirty minutes without exhausting the audience? Scott rises to the occasion with remarkable finesse, using each retelling not merely to repeat events, but to subvert and recontextualize them, revealing the insidious nature of perception and memory.

The brilliance of The Last Duel lies in its ability to juxtapose seemingly identical scenes, only to unveil their true nature through the shifting gaze of its characters. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the pivotal sequence where Adam Driver’s character views a disturbing encounter as playful seduction, while Jodie Comer’s perspective forces the audience to confront the horrific reality of rape. This stark contrast between subjective perception and objective truth is the film’s razor-sharp commentary on the dangers of unchecked male ego.

At its core, The Last Duel is a searing indictment of masculinity, peeling back the layers of male rivalry to expose how men weaponize power not just to defeat their opponents, but to humiliate and emasculate them. Women, tragically, become collateral in these violent games of dominance, mere pawns in a contest they never asked to play. The script is riddled with uncomfortable questions about heroism, honor, and the self-serving myths men construct about their own nobility. As the film deftly reveals, these so-called heroes are often viewed not as protectors, but as foolish actors in an archaic charade. It’s a brutal exploration of power dynamics, where every "noble" act hides a selfish motive, and the victims, as always, bear the silent scars.

Guillermo Del Toro's Nightmare Alley spirals into a world of psychological and carnal madness, propelled by Bradley Cooper's magnetic performance. Cooper inhabits the role of a false prophet with chilling precision—a man who dares to mock the divine by perverting the gifts meant to uplift him. His character embodies a profoundly tragic figure, one who believes he's transcending moral boundaries but is instead inching closer to his own inevitable doom.

At its core, Nightmare Alley taps into the same existential undercurrents as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Both stories explore men who commit egregious wrongs and escape the literal consequences, only to find themselves trapped in an inescapable psychological purgatory. The true punishment is not the crime itself but the slow suffocation of guilt, a self-imposed mental prison that rivals any physical one. In Cooper's case, this prison feels as claustrophobic and degrading as the geek cage, a potent symbol of the dehumanizing spiral he can’t escape. The lines between freedom and confinement blur, and the deeper tragedy lies in the realization that his fall was never in the crime but in his own mind's unraveling.

Short Cuts is nothing short of a pioneering achievement, birthing a genre that paved the way for films like Magnolia and, unfortunately, Crash. Yet, Altman’s film stands as the true originator of this unofficial trilogy. It weaves an intricate tapestry of daily life in Los Angeles, where a sprawling ensemble cast moves through a city that feels perpetually on the verge of unraveling. Beneath the surface, as tectonic plates subtly shift, there’s a palpable sense that disaster is imminent, not just geologically but morally and emotionally.

Altman’s genius lies in his ability to strip away the layers of his characters, revealing the raw, unvarnished truths of their existence. By the time the inevitable earthquake strikes at the film’s conclusion, the tremor feels less like an isolated event and more like a seismic reflection of the internal ruptures that have been brewing throughout the story. It’s a portrait of a city not just on the brink of collapse, but of a civilization teetering on the edge of its own undoing.

Short Cuts doesn't just prefigure disaster—it prophesies it. And while Magnolia and Crash would go on to explore similar themes of a city damned, struggling with fractured human connections and redemption, Altman’s film remains the most visceral, the most prescient. His vision of Los Angeles is one of inevitable decay, where salvation feels out of reach, and yet, the inhabitants continue to grasp desperately at fleeting moments of meaning in the face of an impending apocalypse. Altman doesn’t merely predict the collapse; he captures the slow, steady disintegration of a world that can’t quite admit it’s already begun.

In its early slate of films, Pixar established itself as the premier storyteller of modern morality tales, seamlessly blending entertainment with profound life lessons. Toy Story dealt with the complexities of jealousy, Inside Out explored the nuances of our emotions, and Up captured the essence of eternal love. What sets Pixar apart, however, is its refusal to opt for simplistic resolutions. As the studio evolved, it began to infuse its films with deeply adult themes, posing questions that are often left untouched by children's cinema.

Finding Nemo marks a pivotal point in Pixar’s maturation, where the studio began confronting larger issues in earnest. On the surface, it’s a charming tale of an overprotective father searching for his lost son, but beneath this heartwarming narrative lies a much more adult concern—learning to let go. Marlin, the father, embodies an understandable yet crippling fear of loss, and the film poignantly explores how that fear can hinder both parent and child. It's a story just as much for adults as it is for children, reminding us of the inevitable challenges of releasing control and trusting the world.

In Finding Nemo, Pixar shows its mastery of tackling big ideas in deceptively simple packages. The film marked the beginning of the studio's deep dive into complex, existential questions—issues of fear, control, and acceptance—all wrapped in the bright, candy-coated visuals that make them palatable for audiences of all ages. It's not just a film about a lost fish; it's a meditation on the emotional journey of parenthood, one that lingers long after the credits roll.

The War of the World: The New Century is a dark satire that echoes the themes of Orwell’s 1984, centering on the control and manipulation of truth. The story follows a television anchor who, under coercion by invading Martians, becomes the mouthpiece for their propaganda. His role is not merely to report the news but to keep the population docile, suppressing panic while his wife is held hostage and he is violently punished for deviating from their script. This is not a film that relies on subtlety—it opts for a sledgehammer over a scalpel, carving out a biting critique of media control and coercion.

Much like 1984, the film explores the terrifying power of media as a control tool. The most chilling moment comes near the end when, with nothing left to lose, the anchor attempts to break free from the Martians' hold and deliver an authentic message of rebellion. However, his defiant speech is distorted during the broadcast, twisted into a message of compliance. Instead of inciting revolt, the altered broadcast urges people to remain docile. The news later reports that the Martians have left and everything is fine, but the insidious truth is clear—they are now embedded within the government. The TV is not just a medium of information but a device of mass pacification; to control it is to control society itself.

In many ways, the film embodies Malcolm X's famous warning: "If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." The War of the World: The New Century amplifies this message, underscoring the terrifying consequences of a reality shaped by manipulation and control, where the truth is constantly reshaped to suit the needs of those in power.

The Iron Claw deliberately sidesteps the prevalent question that dominated wrestling in the 1970s and 1980s: is it real? Unlike Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, which focuses on the physical toll these athletes endure, The Iron Claw chooses a more measured and reflective path, delving into the emotional and psychological toll that wrestling exacts on a single family.

The film is straightforward, but a devastating emotional depth lies beneath its simplicity. It tells the story of a father who demands unrelenting discipline from his sons, pitting them against one another and dismissing vulnerability as weakness. This is the curse of the Von Erich brothers—a family trapped within the suffocating confines of their father’s expectations, a tragedy that ultimately claimed many of their lives.

The Iron Claw is a profoundly heartbreaking film. It doesn’t need to embellish its message—the raw tragedy of this family's story resonates powerfully on its own, making it an unforgettable exploration of familial pressure, loss, and the cost of impossible standards.

Triangle of Sadness is a masterful blend of the satirical bite of Luis Buñuel and the absurdity of Monty Python. The film owes a clear debt to Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel in its portrayal of the upper class gradually stripped of their luxuries until their hypocrisy is laid bare for all to see.

The narrative is elegantly structured into three distinct acts, each designed to explore the behavior of the privileged when they find themselves both at the pinnacle of society and at its most desperate nadir. One of the most compelling arcs involves a male model who initially condemns his girlfriend for expecting him to pay for their meals, only to find later himself prostituting his body for mere pretzel sticks when the social order collapses. Similarly, the cleaning woman who listens to "New Noise" by Refused offers a glimpse into her internal rebellion, a subtle yet profound hope for a world where the first shall be last, and the last shall be first—an aspiration she ultimately brings to fruition.

The Monty Python-esque absurdity emerges at the film's core, particularly in the prolonged, grotesque sequences of vomit and excrement. What begins as an over-the-top spectacle soon transcends distaste, becoming a bizarrely hypnotic display. We need works like this to shock us out of our complacency, forcing us to confront the absurdities of our world.

I've long believed that Christopher Nolan is, at his core, a structuralist. By this, I mean that he is primarily concerned with the architecture of his films—the way they would look if mapped out on a graph or chart. While this might sound overly academic, what sets Nolan apart is his ability to fuse this cerebral approach to filmmaking with genuine emotional depth.

Take Memento, his second film, as a prime example. The story is told in reverse, with a protagonist suffering from short-term memory loss. With each backward shift in time, the character, Leonard, must reorient himself—asking the fundamental questions of existence: Where am I? What brought me here? What am I doing? In the hands of a lesser director, this structural conceit might serve as a mere intellectual exercise, a clever trick with little more than surface-level appeal. However, Nolan transcends this by transforming Leonard’s forgetfulness into a profound commentary on the human condition.

As the film culminates—in what is, paradoxically, the first scene—we realize that Leonard has deliberately constructed a false narrative, setting himself on a path that, while misguided, gives his life meaning. He needs this purpose because, without it, he is nothing. And isn't that a reflection of all of us? Aren't we all pursuing some elusive goal, clinging to a sense of direction? The real question is—how many of us would even know what to do if we ever truly attained it?

You have to admire the unyielding conviction behind Blonde and how fully it embraces its darkness. Rather than just brushing against the edges of despair, this film dives headfirst into it, as if peering into the inside of a coffin. Blonde doesn’t just include one abortion, but two, along with a miscarriage—Andrew Dominik was adamant about making these moments pivotal to his grim vision. Even the seemingly lighthearted scenes on the set of Some Like it Hot are tinged with references to them.

I can understand why some might dislike this film. I haven’t always been a fan of Dominik’s previous work, which sometimes felt needlessly bleak and cynical, almost as if it were for show. But in Blonde, the darkness feels earned. Drawing inspiration from what David Lynch might have brought when he was once attached to Marilyn Monroe’s story, Dominik creates a chilling narrative about how the relentless search for maternal love can sow the seeds of our destruction. I’ve known many people who grew up without mothers or fathers, and it leaves a wound that never fully heals. The strongest among them find a way to turn that scar into a gift, transforming it into their superpower. But for many, that central wound—being abandoned when they were most vulnerable—is too deep to conquer. This is a story about someone who succumbed to that wound.

So many films ask us to accept moral relativism, meaning they serve to blur the line between what is good and what is evil. This is healthy, as it helps us understand all perspectives and makes us well-rounded viewers. Occasionally, though, it's nice to see a movie that does the exact opposite. FRAILTY views righteousness as black and white; it's a film that posits that the world is filled with evil people who do unspeakable things and good people who were put on this earth to hunt down and kill them.

One of the most unusual film screenings I've ever attended was seeing Terrance Mallick's THE TREE OF LIFE a year before it was released. When the lights came up, there were two types of people in the tiny screening room: weepy film students and baffled executives scratching their heads asking, "what the fuck do we do with this?"

This film can be overwhelming if you approach it with an open heart.

Orson Welles's response to being criticized for exaggerating his creative contributions to CITIZEN KANE in Pauline Kael's "Raising Kane" was to make a documentary about a famous art forger. F FOR FAKE is a playful take on authorship and Welles's own dubious relationship with the truth, his tendency towards exaggeration, and a proclivity for "printing the legend."

Dario Argento made some singular films, but he never really topped his first, which has an unforgettable murder staged in a bougie art gallery. Separated by the glass, our hero is forced to sit back and watch a poor helpless girl be skewered. THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE is a combination of high art and shlock, and unlike other Argento films, it at least has the semblance of making sense.

It's no small feat to create your own belief system on film, but that is just what DEFENDING YOUR LIFE does. The film shows an alternate version of purgatory where your life plays out like a trial where you must defend your life choices. It depicts planet earth as a spiritual school where humans are meant to learn lessons to grow to move forward to the next stage of existence. It's a strangely life-affirming film because it gives the viewer clear directions on how we are meant to conduct ourselves, and like religion, it offers hope for redemption if we make the right choices with our time here on earth.

It's an old motto that art is subjective, but Banksy seems to take issue with that in EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP. Here, he sends up a kind of populist art that is ironic but ultimately empty. The film draws a clear line between what is worthy and worthless, and it takes no prisoners as it mocks those who fall for Mr. Brainwash and his distinct brand of bullshit, including Madonna and Brad Pitt.

The documentary may be the best thing made about what it means to have honor and what it means to sell out.

SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS follows a movie director who purposely makes himself homeless for research on his upcoming picture. No scene hits harder than the one where Sullivan, now rendered penniless and detained, watches the delight as a bunch of prisoners light up at the sight of a Mickey Mouse cartoon. The film is a mission statement about the need for entertainment as an escape instead of making art that wallows in despair because it's considered "important."

As is often the case with movies that start a genre, the first instance is usually the best, and what follows pales in comparison. I mean, every shark film made following JAWS was living in the shadow of a cloud in the shape of that killer shark movie. Similarly, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT remains the best found-footage movie. This fear the film produces directly relates to the filmmakers trying to convince us that these events actually happened. This starts with the idea of sending actors into the woods and having producers and directors behind the scenes pulling the strings to generate tangible fear. It also spreads to the marketing, with websites that built up the lore and invited viewers to become detectives solving a mystery.

Once this film was released, the magic trick was performed, the rabbit was out of the hat, and there was no putting it back. Other found footage films came and went but never reached this height. BLAIR WITCH, like THE EXORCIST, serves as a reminder that making a film that terrifies people has everything to do with how seriously the filmmakers take the premise. If the people making the film are truly scared, that fear will translate to the audience.

In terms of provocative films, it doesn't get more morally queasy than THE NIGHT PORTER. The film is directed by a woman and remains one of the most transgressive films ever made. THE NIGHT PORTER focuses on a sadomasochistic relationship that develops between one of the guards and an inmate in a concentration camp. It's the kind of plot that would make even Jerry Lewis say, "isn't that a bit much."

I kind of love that Alan J. Pakula went straight from THE PARALLAX VIEW to ALL THE PRESIDENTS' MEN. The former may be the most over-the-top conspiracy film of all time, complete with cigar-chomping men in smokey backrooms working on brainwashing techniques to create sleeper agents. The film's message stops just short of declaring, "It's the Illuminati doing it!" And even then, it basically says that.

ALL THE PRESIDENTS' MEN couldn't be more different; it's a grounded film based on an actual conspiracy that had only occurred a few years earlier, the details of which had become extensively publicized. Watching both movies back-to-back offer two case studies on handling this type of political thriller: on polar opposite ends of the spectrum.

One of the few things Lars von Trier made that actually observes the rules of Dogme 95; THE KINGDOM is laugh-out-loud funny, with many sequences that suggest a blending of TWIN PEAKS and French farce. For pure entertainment factor alone, this is the most watchable thing Trier ever made.

Speaking as someone who has endured SALO, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM, THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE, and A SERBIAN FILM, I still think the most disgusting thing ever put on film is Isabelle Huppert’s character having sex with a guy wearing his sweaty hockey gear on the bathroom floor in THE PIANO TEACHER.

The film is a character study that takes us into the dark subconscious of someone with sexual hang-ups so deep-rooted they would make Freud jump out a window.

It’s unfortunate how relevant Fellini’s LA STRADA still is; the push-pull dynamic it depicts between a macho man and the woman foolish enough to love him is a tale as old as time. The film can reduce people to tears because of what it says about the tragedy that plagues most relationships: put simply, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

I love this poster; the idea of a movie being advertised using famous composers is so anachronistic and charming. People forget how transfixing FANTASIA is; it's often neglected when people talk about Disney's many contributions to cinema. The Sorcerer's Apprentice remains the most iconic segment, but the portion set to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony focusing on half-nude female centaurs is hilarious, and the Night at Bald Mountain segment is still frightening, painting a perfect picture of what the composition evokes.

James Cameron's title card at the end of TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY says, "Written, Directed and Produced by James Cameron." To put that in perspective, that means not only did Cameron write, "The T-1000 flies the helicopter underneath the overpass, its blades spinning mere feet beneath the concrete, its skids nearly touching the pavement," but he then had to convince a stunt pilot to do it. And to top it all off, he watched it all play out, biting his nails, knowing he would surely shoulder the blame if anything went wrong with the insane stunt.

VERTIGO may be the first instance of auteur cinema. Dismissed as a middling film upon release, the movie only grew in esteem over the years, now routinely topping lists of the greatest films ever made. That it grew in people's view is directly correlated with rabid film fans dissecting it through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock, the man, the perfectionist who plays dress-up with blondes to recreate memories of a love long gone (or who never was.) For better or worse, the trend of reading films as portals into the subconscious of their visionaries started with VERTIGO.

THE AVIATOR didn't get enough credit for taking the road less traveled. Rather than ending on a down note, Scorsese makes the third act about Hughes's triumph over mental illness. You hear someone is making a Howard Hughes biopic, and you immediately think the third act will chronicle the downward spiral, Kleenex boxes, jars of piss and all.

Another thing I've grown to admire about the film over the years is how it depicts paranoia. Between this, TAXI DRIVER and SHUTTER ISLAND, Scorsese is the chief purveyor of paranoia on film. THE AVIATOR somehow manages to add another layer to his continued fascination with this subject. Yes, Hughes was paranoid, but the head of Pan Am Airways was conspiring against him behind the scenes. In the penultimate scene, when Hughes suspects his Spruce Goose victory party has been infiltrated by spies, he is right. The film questions the thin line between paranoia and awareness. If you are rich and famous, you inevitably end up with more rivals, and it's not paranoia if they're really after you.

David Cronenberg leaned into the criticism leveled at him and Brian De Palma and John Carpenter in the early 1980s. Around this time, there was much hullabaloo made about how movies caused people to be violent. Rather than shy away from this critique, Cronenberg was inspired by it. VIDEODROME audaciously admits, "yes, media is making people more violent, and it's only going to get worse." The film is halfway between a satire and a confession, and the fact that you can never tell how much of it you're supposed to take seriously only makes it that much more seductive.

DEMOLITION MAN was made at the perfect time, snuck in before political correctness became a religion, the film envisions Los Angeles as a progressive nightmare. Since so much of what it's satirizing has come to pass, it almost plays better now.

Although BONNIE AND CLYDE is credited with starting the golden age of cinema in the '70s, it really started here, with Mike Nichols's debut film. Even after all these years, WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOLF? remains one of the best acted, shot, and blocked movies of all time. The film's acting style straddles a line between "play to the rafters" theatrical and the soon-to-be-popular Stella Adler method technique. The way people move in this film is still mesmerizing; it's an affront to the boring conventional blocking people had grown accustomed to up until this point. Here, actors finally feel alive in their environment.

Made three decades before the words "school" and "shooting" became all too comfortable beside one another, IF…. centers on a traditional British public school, it shows us its strict rules and regulations the students must endure, and then it asks us to celebrate as the teens take up arms against the headmasters. It's safe to say it's a movie that would never be made today.

A film that has just a satisfactory first and third act with a masterpiece sandwiched in the middle, COLD MOUNTAIN depicts the civil war like a portal to hell opened up and demons came spilling out all over the south. It's like a Hieronymus Bosh painting come to life.

STRAW DOGS is obsessed with powerlessness and emasculation. It doesn't really take place in the countryside in England; as much as it takes place in the mind of someone who fears outsiders, it borders on xenophobic in its depictions of the "other."

It's a film I've struggled with over the years, finding it at times maddening and enthralling in equal measure. What is fascinating is every move Dustin Hoffman's nebbish mathematician character takes in the third act. You'll notice he doesn't kill anyone until they have unlawfully entered his home or attacked his person. In that sense, the film's finale is the ultimate conservative revenge fantasy, as the preyed upon lone wolf can exact righteous death upon all those who come near his wife and his castle.

A film that shows how ostensibly trivial things can add up to a life-changing epiphany, 45 YEARS doesn't lead to one big blowout moment; it instead shows little moments that dig away at its female protagonist's psyche, as she slowly realizes her relationship is built on a lie. A terrifying reminder that anyone can fall out of love in a week, even after spending a lifetime together.

If you watch Oliver Stone's best film, TALK RADIO, it's hard to believe it isn't based on Howard Stern. It feels like an unofficial biopic (even though it isn't.) The film feels like it prophesied Stern, among other things. It's a flawed character study of someone cursed with a big mouth. A man who would rather talk his way to an early grave than censor himself.

For all the flaws Stone has as a director, his best movies are the ones where he aimed his discriminating eye at the media. In these films, he comes off as a soothsayer. It's hard to watch the end of TALK RAIDO, where various callers chime in with their feelings, and not see the parallels with the rise of YouTube, where everyone can be an asshole with an opinion.

The best word to describe WEST SIDE STORY is immaculate. The film is perfect, from the lighting to the cinematography to how the bodies move in precise rhythm. It really has more in common with animated movies like FANTASIA than with any other live-action film. That it feels this controlled goes to show you the amount of pressure put on these performers; it must have been a hell of a movie to make, either that or the film Gods were smiling down and blessing the production from up high.

Robert Altman made a Lynchian film before anyone knew what that word meant with 3 WOMEN. The film visualizes unspoken communication in the feminine sphere, a psychic bond, and a language that men cannot understand. Fittingly, it's an ethereal, nearly impenetrable film that feels as contemporary as something A24 would put out.

One of the most heartbreaking films of all time, BREAKING THE WAVES, finds a thoughtful criticism of blind faith in the form of a dutiful wife who takes her drugged-up husband's delirious orders at face value. It remains Lars Von Trier's best film, partly because it walks a perfect tightrope between melodrama and realism.

SICARIO has an opening that puts you on the edge of your seat, and the film doesn't ever let up. In fact, the only respite the film takes turns out to be a red herring, as our female protagonist takes home a male suitor, only to find out he too wants to kill her.

What lingers about SICARIO is that it's one of those rare Hollywood films about failure; it doesn't offer any solution to the complex issue of the drug cartels in Mexico. It's a funeral, mourning the ever-growing catastrophe happening right under our noses.

A genuinely heartbreaking movie that dramatizes a failure of communication. WALKABOUT is two movies at once; from the young woman's perspective, it's a film about how an Aboriginal boy helps her and her brother through the Australian outback. The Aboriginal boy sees it as a love story, but the young woman doesn't realize that he is courting her because they come from totally different cultures. An incredible film by Nicolas Roeg, who made a series of masterpieces all about subjective perspective.

AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE is a case study in raising the stakes. It begins with a character about to be executed. He is hunted like a rabid dog when he escapes. It may be the best short film of all time, and the way it pulls the carpet out from the under viewer has been imitated by countless feature films that bill themselves as having a twist.

A great fish out of water story and still an underseen film, Billy Wilder’s ONE, TWO, THREE sends a hard-nosed exec from the Coca-Cola company to Berlin to sell the communists on the popular beverage. He is also tasked with keeping an eye on the boss’s firebrand daughter, who moves to Berlin and promptly marries a communist. A zany, screwball comedy that is enhanced by characters rooted in the real world.

The best scene in THE GAME is seldom discussed. After Nicholas survives the "game" of the movie's title, where he suspected nefarious forces were trying to take his money and his life, he is approached by his brother Conrad and shown the bill to pay for the budget for the event. Based on Nicholas's reaction, it's a high price tag, but he has no problem paying it; after all, money seems trivial after what he's been through.

What is so funny about this moment is, if you think about the entire thing as a sting designed to get Nicholas's money, this is the moment where he willing hands it all over. The perfect swindle is one where the person being stolen from surrenders with a smile.

MAY is a campy horror film that doubles as a fascinating character study about a woman who seeks perfection in people but can't help but focus on their best parts. The film is riddled with exciting characters who grow to be hypocrites in May's scrutinous eyes, like an aspiring horror director who loves blood on-screen but winces at the sight of it in real life. The film feels like a retelling of Pygmalion or Frankenstein through the eyes of someone with Asperger's syndrome.

I think LOOPER is going to have the same legacy as BLADE RUNNER. Sci-fi similarities aside, I think both films were not fully understood upon release. In BLADE RUNNER, the notion of Deckard being a replicant was a hypothesis that grew over time, it was never the definitive interpretation of the film until people foisted this interpretation on the film, and then it became the most popular fan theory of all time.

Similarly, I think there are layers in LOOPER that went over people's heads when it was first released. Throughout the film, there are little hints that Cid, the child who will grow up to be the legendary Rainmaker, is also a variation of Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis's characters. Watch the film with this interpretation in mind, it makes it even more moving, and I'm 89% sure it holds up to scrutiny.

Although I may have just been really, really high when I came up with this hypothesis. Either way, it's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Not so much of a movie in the traditional sense. UNFAITHFULLY YOURS is instead a series of set pieces where a purportedly two-timed orchestra conductor pictures revenge fantasies centered on the killing of his seemingly adulterous wife. By the end of the film, the man realizes he was mistaken; his wife was loyal and pure, yet he was on the verge of butchering her! The film chalks it all up to the artist's temperament.

SPENCER is like THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER, but the Thief is the stodgy rules and regulations of Christmas holidays with the Royals. The comparisons don't end there; both films are obsessed with food and have a structure that follows the regiments of each day until the third act, where the monotony is broken, and our heroine finds her freedom.

Society has changed so much since the early '90s, where being a princess was perceived as the ultimate wish fulfillment. Flash forward thirty years later, and here's a film that shows us the most famous princess of our time, and it's basically a horror film. The beautiful costumes are laid out as sparkling traps designed to shackle the Princess of Wales' autonomy. No scene emotionally affected me more this year than the one where Diana's favorite dresser hands her a note that says something like, "I'm not the only one who loves you." As a film, it's also as weird as TWIN PEAKS, with a score by Jonny Greenwood that sounds like it was inspired by Angelo Badalamenti.

The most punk thing Alex Cox did when he went from his absurd debut REPO MAN to SID & NANCY was turning in an earnest drama. The film presents the punk subculture as a bunch of lost children who had too much fame too early. Mix it with a pair of star-crossed lovers, and it's a recipe for tragedy.

A story unveiling itself as fantasy taking place in a character's mind just before they die has become a bit of a cliché. Although when JACOB'S LADDER first came out, it hadn't been seen before, so you can't blame the film for being imitated. You can see the fingerprints of Adrian Lyne's LADDER on things from SILENT HILL to THE SIXTH SENSE, and it still packs a punch, with sequences that will forever live in the mind of anyone who has witnessed them. It's a hallucinatory fever dream dramatizing the feeling of clinging onto life in the face of overwhelming evidence that we must accept death.

Unfortunately, the definitive version of ALIEN 3 exists somewhere between the theatrical cut and the assembly cut. At the time of the film's release, people couldn't get past the casual killing of Hicks and Newt, but if you think about it from a different perspective, ALIEN 3 follows the tradition of ALIEN, in that Ripley is the sole survivor thrust into a new world to explore.

It's an uncompromising film that drags the franchise and its main character to a literal hell on earth and offers no solution to combating evil other than sacrificing yourself.

MARTYRS somehow manages to elevate the otherwise irredeemable genre of torture porn into something actually resembling high art. The key to its staying power is it finds a logical reason to skin people alive and take them to the brink of death that isn't some outlandish revenge plot. The reason they torture in MARTYRS is rooted in the spiritual world; it posits that by bringing someone to the verge of death, you may discover the meaning of life.

THE CHANGELING from 1980 is a film that has fallen by the wayside in the conversation of great horror films. Its most horrifying sequence involves a little girl who wakes up to find a kid submerged in water and trapped under the floorboards.

In the end, the film reveals itself to be a bit of a political thriller; THE CHANGELING feels like if Alan J. Pakula had made THE OMEN.

BRITANNIA HOSPITAL is the weakest entry in Lindsay Anderson's loose trilogy that includes IF… (the original FIGHT CLUB) and O LUCKY MAN! (Perhaps the most underrated film of all time.) HOSPITAL is the youngest child of the trilogy, and it isn't as memorable as the other two. Having said that, it does have one of the best endings of all time. It climaxes with the unveiling of something called "The Genesis Project," a human brain wired to machinery, which recites Hamlet in an uncanny premonition of man's foray into merging with technology.

Adrian Lyne somehow got it in his head that the only way to truly adapt LOLITA was to cast a then fifteen-year-old Dominique Swain in the titular role, nude scenes and all. This purest mentality pretty much ruined his career, as he only completed one film after his controversial adaptation of the famous novel. Controversy aside, the 1997 version does have something Kubrick's adaptation lacked; it doesn't shy away from the darkness of a pathetic man trying to recapture his youth by stealing someone else's.

From its devil-may-care tone to its rebellious characters, down to its anarchist ending, THEY LIVE feels like someone's last film; it really has no fucks left to give. A film that wasn't fully appreciated at the time of release, its cultural relevance grew over time. It's a film that has been imitated in video games and TV shows and ported over to the real world in the form of ironic advertising campaigns. The bizarre movie has become a bonified cult classic, and the cult is only growing with time. This is in part because it finds a perfect visual metaphor to communicate the enduring fight between "us" and "they."

Roger Ebert once said that a great film has "three great scenes and no bad ones." THE RULES OF ATTRACTION has some bad scenes, so it isn't a great film by the Ebert edict, but it does have two great scenes. One of them involves a drug-fueled vacation recalled at breakneck speed, the effect of which was achieved by actually sending the actor on a crazy vacation with a camcorder and saying, "do it for real."

The other great scene involves a secondary character committing suicide and being awash in regret just as it's too late to turn back.

Fellini introduced people to the self-indulgent aristocracy in LA DOLCE VITA. Here is a film that blazed light on the upper echelons of society, presenting a world of excess, fame, and debauchery amongst Rome's popular culture. There is a direct correlation between what is shown on screen here and our modern world. For starters, the word Paparazzi comes from this film, inspired by a character. But it goes beyond that; the film was a window into a lifestyle only a few people were living at the time; by the time the film was released, it became the culture the middle class emulated. It's one of the most explicit examples of art influencing life. The ultimate irony is the soullessness Fellini was indicting here was embraced by the public. The people ignored his advice and instead moved one step closer to vapidness.

Paul Thomas Anderson's PHANTOM THREAD is a romantic movie that is trepidatious to celebrate a fairytale ending too early. It instead presents a true-to-life take on love, showing the challenges and modifications we make to accommodate our significant others. THREAD ends on a peculiar note, with the previously cold fashion designer eating a steady diet of hallucinogens, the magic elixir that makes him vulnerable. A thinly veiled confession from a perfectionist director about how his own desire for control has rendered him nearly impossible to deal with.

Errol Morris's THE THIN BLUE LINE has the characteristic of being a piece of media that may have saved someone's life. This documentary changed people's perceptions in a way that ultimately got its subject freed from death row.

It's still riveting as a documentary, employing never-before-seen editing techniques that demonstrate the unreliability of eyewitness testimony and showcase how fallible human memory can be.

I would be all for Denis Villeneuve's career from now on just being a series of dares seeing if he can make previously thought to be unadaptable properties. I mean, he has proven again and again he is up for the challenge. What's that? You got a politically charged Mexican border thriller released in the height of an election year, "no problem." Alien invasion story that questions the nature of time as we know it, "piece of cake." Beloved cult sci-fi franchise, known for its vagueness and nuance; "I can do it in my sleep."

How about we give him HOUSE OF LEAVES, or maybe just put three books in a blender and say, "now what are you gonna do, Denis."

And now DUNE, his crowning achievement. Look, I was twenty-five by the time I got around to watching STAR WARS, and by that time, I was already a bit cynical and world-weary, but this made me understand what seeing that for the first time must have felt like. He took the previously mysterious, overtly political world and made it as accessible as STAR WARS. Some may call that a flaw, but I was swept up by the vision on display here. Not to mention his use of special effects as a visual metaphor, fantastic stuff. Denis makes me proud to be a Canadian.

Worth seeing if only for the villain's escape plan of releasing an intoxicating odor that makes everyone in the town square fuck. There are shots in the third act of PERFUME where there's a man in the foreground and about two hundred people having an orgy in the background. One of those flawed films that still must be seen to be believed.

The neglected next film from the guys who made AIRPLANE! A comedy comprised almost entirely of sight gags, TOP SECRET! is a dumb movie that is even more charming when you sit back and think about how much time and effort went into achieving these supremely silly jokes.

One of those films that shows the passage of time in a totally unique way, where history is happening in the background as our characters go from the plague to Richard Donner's SUPERMAN. You get the sense critics at the time were unfair to this film, eager to sink their teeth into hunks of the day Pitt and Cruise. INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE also has a great mid-section; the stuff focused on Kirsten Dunst is still shocking even by today's standards.

Pitched somewhere between ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT and Shakespeare, SUCCESSION is awe-inspiring for many reasons. What sticks out to me are the pitfalls it avoids. Often shows that glimpse into lifestyles of the rich and famous fall into one of two traps. They either buy the bullshit these elites are selling and ask the audience to put these people on a pedestal, or they do the inverse, and the wealthy are painted as mustache-twirling villains, straw men pitted against noblemen proletariats in lopsided, unrealistic moral battles.

SUCCESSION does neither and instead finds pathos in these characters. This is the best kind of drama; it's not punching up or down but inviting you to watch a captivating family fight, with characters as conflicted and confused as Lear or Hamlet. Exquisite, once-in-a-decade television.

I used to consider SOUTHLAND TALES a guilty pleasure, but now, I think of it more of a cautionary tale. What is undeniable is that some of the ideas on display here are way ahead of their time; what Edward Snowden leaked about the NSA was sensationalized here in 2008, close to a decade before it made headline news.

One thing is for sure: no director committed career suicide with as much confidence as Richard Kelley did when crafting SOUTHLAND TALES.

There is no adversary in THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST other than grief. It centers on a couple who stay together to honor the memory of their murdered son. They wallow in a loveless marriage until a dog trainer enters the picture and captures the heart of the grieving father and helps him understand what it feels like to be alive again. This often-overlooked film will speak to anyone who has wrestled with depression.

There are so many things DOCTOR SLEEP does effortlessly. First and foremost, the task of creating a sequel to THE SHINING comes with a lot of pressure, but Mike Flanagan manages to nail the eerie tone of Steven King's long-awaited follow-up book while also staying true to Kubrick's film version.

The film does a phenomenal job of handling heady concepts like telepathy and astral projection. Here is a story where people are often physically in one location and projecting their conciseness to another place across the globe. This is the kind of thing that could quickly get confusing in less skilled hands, but the film is so well crafted that you are never confused about where people are. It takes the notion of "shining" and expands on it, making you understand what having this psychic gift would actually feel like.

The most subversive thing about JOKER is that the bleak tale's first actual gag focuses on a little person who can't reach a door handle. The uncomfortable laughter this scene might elicit won't be far off from Arthur Fleck chuckling at all the wrong beats in the comedy club. Watching the movie may remind you that its director started his career with a documentary on GG Allin. That same punk rock sensibility is woven into the DNA of this film. It's no wonder it was controversial; JOKER was a provocation designed to get a reaction.

An exposé on the games married people play with each other, Ingmar Bergman's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE is at once romantic and devastating, sweet and brutal. It shows the thin line between love and hate and how agonizingly similar those two emotions are. It's a 282 minute deep dive into the terrible things we do in the name of love.

If you ever want a hint of how uncomfortable humanity is at any place other than the top of the food chain, pop in FANTASTIC PLANET. The animated film places humans at the hands of their much bigger and bluer oppressors. The feeling of being something's plaything is unnatural and will give you a new outlook on our place in the world. The film portrays a sense of powerlessness that is replicated in Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS.

Amongst the most provocative films ever made, WEEKEND follows a bourgeois couple into the woods where they are indoctrinated by a group of hippie revolutionaries who dabble in some light cannibalism. It's an overtly political film that doesn't hide its aims to brainwash the audience with its extremist philosophy.

Although I'm pretty sure the Coen's rejected this interpretation, I've always loved Roger Ebert's take on BARTON FINK. He read it as a takedown of the intellectuals employed as writers in the early days of Hollywood. These guys were praised for having gigantic personalities and strong opinions about art. Still, they failed to foresee the rise of fascism because they were too busy gazing at their navels.

PATHS OF GLORY shows the disparity between those who make the rules and those who must follow them. The way the state deals with the defiant soldiers seems so official, but all this pomp can't mask what is, in its essence, a barbarous act. This film marks Kubrick's first instance of thumbing his nose at authority, a rebellious streak that would only grow throughout his career.

A cutting and sharp Hollywood satire that showcases the ruthlessness of the industry. ALL ABOUT EVE birthed the trope of the two-faced actress, all smiles in public as roses fall at her feet, but plotting behind the scenes. She steps over bodies to grab the ladder's rungs. It's a story about the cyclical nature of backstabbing, showcasing how those who screw others over are doomed to live in fear that the same fate will befall them, always looking over their shoulder to see who is vying for the crown.

Sometimes being too early will get you penalized. Birthing the voyeuristic slasher genre two decades before it became fashionable would have disastrous results for director Michael Powell, and PEEPING TOM finished his career. Nowadays, people fall asleep to Netflix specials on serial killers and watch Freddy and Jason movies as comfort food. PEEPING TOM is tame by today's standards, and its portrayal of a man with a movie camera is surprisingly critical of the destructive male gaze.

The criminally underrated THIRST is a remake of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, but with vampires. The love affair between two characters with an insatiable taste for blood builds to a tragic and slapstick conclusion as the two vampires try to avoid the impending rising sun with only a tiny car to keep them safe.

As a comedy, all the laughs in THE FIREMEN'S BALL come from the leaders' best intentions. They plan for a delightful evening, but all of their designs fail to predict human behavior, which is often erratic. Although Miloš Forman insisted THE FIREMEN'S BALL was only meant to be about what its name implies, the film's legacy will remember it as a satire that exposes the ineptitude of communism.

For all its transgressions, TITANE ultimately reveals itself to be about parental love. It shows how children who feel they are a burden lash out become violent and confused. Then it contrasts that by introducing a parental love that is all-encompassing and grateful. The film depicts how this kind of love can transform even the blackest of souls.

This message will come across crystal clear if you look past the heroine murdering a whole dorm of college students, getting railed hard by a flame-painted car, and lactating motor oil. On the other side of all this madness is a tender film just waiting to be embraced.

I have a fun game I play in my head when I watch CASINO; I try and figure out how they achieved every shot on a technical level. Try it yourself, and you'll soon find yourself bewildered. The wizardry on display here is genuinely impossible to keep up with, and soon you'll find yourself at a loss for figuring out how the sausage was made and swept up in the story.

Luis Buñuel's BELLE DE JOUR is about a well-to-do woman who spends her afternoons working as a high-class prostitute. It is one of the first films to depict women as perverts, a concept you sense hadn't occurred to the vast majority of men at this point in history. Not Buñuel, who spent his career chronicling all sorts of perversions.

The thing ANNIHILATION gets about aliens invading earth is how helpless humankind would be to a truly superior race. Instead of portraying our conquest as being achieved through brawn or bombs, Alex Garland imagines this incursion delivered through the tender embrace of a long-lost loved one.

After all, the most efficient way of defeating another species would be to fool them into thinking they've actually won.

A parody ahead of its time, WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY, was released in 2007, well before the tropes of the musical biopic were ingrained in our collective conscience. To this day, the clichés this lewd film sends up are employed without irony by storytellers trying (and failing) to breathe new life into the narrow confines of this dull genre. Be warned; WALK HARD will ruin your ability to take any earnest film about musicians seriously.

The notoriously unsentimental Coen Brothers would probably cringe at the suggestion, but INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS may secretly be about their lifelong partnership.

Think about it; the film centers on the titular character who has recently released his first solo album after his longtime partner committed suicide. The album isn’t selling, and Llewyn finds himself drifting into obscurity without the support of his former collaborator. The bleak tale may be the Coen’s unconventional way of saying, “I can’t do it without you.”

MIDNIGHT MASS has its cake and eats it too, and I mean that as a compliment. The Netflix show feels like the screed of an angsty teen who wants to tear down the institution of religion blended with the maturity of someone who has lived long enough to see the many benefits of it. It's as excessive as a zombie film and as deft as a Bergman film. It wants to convey the message that God doesn't have a plan for everyone, yet, upon scrutiny, if you analyze the events and how they unfold, you see how everyone on Crockett Island played their part to bring down the demon. It knows enough about mass appeal entertainment to give you the blood and guts you want from a horror film and yet shows surprising restraint throughout. Its ending could be interpreted as the purifying floods of the Old Testament or the rapture of Evangelicalism. And to top it all off, it dares to cut to black on a tragedy asks you to see it as a miracle.

It's a modern-day classic and the best thing Mike Flanagan has done, even if I suspect it was first conceived of by getting really high and staring at the front cover of Meat Loaf's Bat out of Hell for too long.

All legal proceedings start with one person's word against another; sometimes, the law pits influential people against the meek and vulnerable. 12 ANGRY MEN is a celebration of stubbornness, dogged determination, and reasonable doubt. Slowly but surely, it chronicles the sequestered men's lingering uncertainties until they all topple like dominoes. It's a film that worships at the altar of logic and celebrates justice being blind to status.

Tarantino said something spot on about JACKIE BROWN. He said if he stayed on the same career trajectory, JACKIE BROWN would have been the kind of film he would have made in his late 70's; he just happened to get it out of his system when he was 40. He credits this "time leap" with freeing him up to be more audacious in his choices moving forward.

Sometimes you hear what inspired a film, and you understand exactly how the concept coalesced. Wes Craven read a series of articles about refugees dying in their sleep from traumatizing nightmares after fleeing to America from the Vietnam war. You can almost see the wheels in Craven's head turn as he thinks, "a nightmare that kills you."

GROUNDHOG DAY is a film no one can accuse of blowing its premise. It goes dark, it has wish fulfillment, it has hijinks. Harold Ramis milks every possible outcome within the parameters of the stuck in the same day idea. Not only does it exhaust anything you could ever want from a concept like this, but then it does the impossible, and the repetitive structure becomes a metaphor about living a life of service, even if it's the same shit different day.

Who would have thought that Louis Malle was birthing an entire subgenre of porn when he made MURMUR OF THE HEART in 1971? Malle referred to the incestuous story as semi-autobiographical, a fact that probably made people take pause before ever affectionately calling Malle a "mother fucker" ever again. But in all sincerity, the film finds tenderness in the uncomfortable situation and deserves praise for tackling a taboo subject matter with grace.

CLOSE-UP demonstrates how a love of film can transform into an unhealthy obsession. The movie about a cinephile who impersonates his favorite director and gets caught up in a fraud case shows great sympathy for its confused protagonist. The film understands that all film lovers begin as impersonators and imposters, pretending to be their hero's until they have sourced enough inspiration to fool people into thinking they are original.

The most amusing thing about ERASERHEAD is how it was received as some indecipherable surrealist artifact whose hidden meaning was impossible to decipher. It's weird because the film is practically screaming: "I'm terrified of becoming a father" from the top of its lungs as its only real message.

It's clear why Steven Soderbergh took a short-lived break from moviemaking after CHE failed to set the box office on fire; it's arguably his best film, and it performed as if it was one of his worst. It was a two-part, four-hour behemoth that felt like something that would have only been green-lit twenty years earlier.

The first part shows the triumphant revolutionary takeover of Cuba, and the second part contrasts that with the failed takeover of Bolivia. To me, the film has always been about the folly of trying to recapture lightning in a bottle; it's about how doing the same thing twice will inevitably lead to defeat. A fitting thesis for a director who seems to reinvent himself every five years.

It almost seems as if the main character at the center of Todd Haynes's SAFE becomes allergic to things. Throughout the film, she searches for the source of her strange illness, until by the end of the film, she finds herself living in a commune where they have no possessions. The film starts with a suburban woman who ostensibly has everything and takes her on a journey to having nothing. It is only through shedding herself of all these things that she finds peace.

Hollywood is often criticized for spoon-feeding social justice causes thinly veiled as art. But when a worthy cause meets a great story, the result can be transcendent. Great art can make us agree on things we as a society are still grappling with. If done with a gentle touch, a transformative piece of art can tip the scales in our collective unconscious and define morality going forward.

Take the case of DEAD MAN WALKING, which tackles the hot button issue of the death penalty. Rather than preach, the film unflinchingly crosscuts between the brutal rape and murder the criminal at the center of the film committed with the state carrying out his execution.

In taking an approach that doesn't hide anything, the film stands firm in its message: that killing is wrong regardless of the circumstances, and even the most wretched amongst us deserve forgiveness.

THE SEVENTH CONTINENT is an early offering by Michael Haneke that proves he appeared on the scene fully developed as a director whose films always pack a punch.

The movie concerning a middle-class family that decides one day to destroy all their possessions and kill themselves is not for the faint of heart, it is brutal and unwavering in its singular aim, but it is also unforgettable and strangely emotional. The film deserves to be mentioned alongside other films that tackled our gluttonousness as we neared the turn of the century. It would make a great double feature alongside Todd Haynes's SAFE, and then you can cap off the night by sticking your head in the oven.

One of the most unapologetically conservative movies ever made by Hollywood, ROLLING THUNDER, plays like a fever dream revenge fantasy. The man who dutifully served his country in Vietnam returns home to discover that he doesn't recognize America anymore. Displaced, and trained for years to be violent, he searches for a cause worth killing for. In many ways, this is the maladjusted, problematic version of TAXI DRIVER, and I'm here for every minute of it.

It's a good thing WAG THE DOG was released before the world was inundated with conspiracy theories. You get the sense that some would confuse the jokes for truth. Nevertheless, the core idea of a seasoned film producer invited to Washington to "produce" a fictional war to distract from a Clintonesque sex scandal has some amusing moments that ring true.

To me, the film is a confession on the dark magic Hollywood uses to mesmerize the world. And how anyone who threatens to reveal how the sausage is made is expendable.

I read the script for INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS a year before it was released, and I figured the ending was a placeholder. I remember reading it, mouth agape, and thinking, "there is no way this ending makes it to the big screen!"

Flash forward to a year later, I'm invited with a few friends to a sneak preview of BASTERDS with Quentin in attendance; Weinstein was there too, watching over everything like the Fuhrer. By the time that third act rolled around, I was on the floor laughing; I could not believe he got away with such a gonzo conclusion.

Tarantino said something interesting after making JACKIE BROWN; he said he had an obligation to make insane movies, the kinds of films only he could get away with making. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is him fulfilling that solemn obligation.

Has any poster more adequately prepared you for what you are in store for better than the MAN BITES DOG one you see here?

The story of a documentary camera crew who is seduced to follow along with a serial killer and eventually partake in his crimes is one of the darkest comedies of all time, finding gallows humor in things that just aren't supposed to be funny. This mockumentary has a bunch of copycats, but nothing compares to this dive into total madness.

Decades from now, if anyone is curious enough to ask, "what was living through the pandemic like?" we can pop on BO BURNHAM'S INSIDE to explain it to them.

Acting as a time capsule, this is a touching and hilarious portrait of 2020, the toll it took on our collective mental health, and one man trying his best to make us laugh through it.

My favorite thing about WALL-E is that Steve Jobs pitched it to Pixar as "a love story between a Mac and a PC." That always struck me as an uncharacteristically tender thing for the apparently insensitive man to stay. It's kind of sweet that Jobs felt like making a love letter to his business rival in the twilight of his life.

FARGO has a fascinating structure. It has scene after scene of awful people doing awful things to each other for an hour and a half. Then, it finally shows you a couple being nice to one another in the last two minutes.

The juxtaposition is jarring; after being inundated with the worst features of humanity, you cannot help but be moved as a wife congratulates her husband on getting a modest second place in his stamp competition. It is overwhelming because of what came before. This beautiful moment acts as the blindingly warm light at the end of a very dark and twisted tunnel.

Pedro Almodóvar one-ups Eric Cartman in SCOTT TENORMAN MUST DIE for the most ruthless revenge with THE SKIN I LIVE IN.

You may think you've seen all the revenge plots there are, but you don't know the depths of degradation until you've seen a man use plastic surgery to transform another man into his dead wife.

Shot in Mexico for a mere $750,000, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN looks like it cost at least 30x more than that.

The centerpiece of the film is an intro to seven characters who each represent an industry. Here, Jodorowsky sends up weapons makers, cosmetics, art dealers, and organized religion. He ridicules these institutions with what seems like enough material for ten films.

Long before FIGHT CLUB questioned our dependence on material things, Jodorowsky encouraged you to burn your money, embark on a spiritual quest, and find a cause worth living for.

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER is a child's nightmare.

It takes the things kids look to for protection and slowly strips them away till all that remains is a bad man who pursues them through the countryside. There, the children find a protector who resembles the woman in "American Gothic," but instead of a pitchfork, she packs a shotgun. This badass granny fearlessly faces off with the devil and becomes the savior of these lost children.

The sole film from director Charles Laughton has been parodied and copied so many times that people forget where the trope originated. Laughton uses the extreme wides to create a sense of helplessness, where you can see precisely where the threat is coming from, but you are paralyzed to do anything as it walks straight to you, like a slow-moving death.

If you want an indicator of how great Krzysztof's Kieslowski's RED is, Quentin Tarantino even acknowledged that it should have won the Palme d'Or instead of PULP FICTION that year.

The people depicted here are flesh and blood, but the film feels like a dialogue between angels and God. It's a conversation where the answers to life's mysteries are resolved, the synchronicities that seem random are laid bare, everything seems linked by miles of telephone wires that stretch underground and connect us all.

The film ends in a sequence where seven people miraculously survive a cruise wreck. Seeing the film isolate who those people are might be the most daring religious message ever put to film.

THE LOVE WITCH is even more impressive when you realize how many hats writer and director Anna Biller had to wear to bring her technicolor vision to the big screen. The film channels Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk to such a degree that it feels like an overlooked gem of the era. It's so draped in the aesthetics of the '50s that you might not realize just how subversive it gets. By the time the film shows you Satanic rituals in exacting detail, you may get the hint of just how provocative Biller is being here.

The film works as a feminist empowerment statement just as much as it works as a whimsical exploration of borderline personality disorder.

The beautiful contradiction that makes FRANCES HA so pleasant is that it features a character who insists she is "undateable" and "unlovable," but the film is directed by someone who is clearly head over heels in love with her.

This character study has the score and tone of a romantic comedy, but it couldn't be further from that. This is a love letter to the weirdos in life, the people who take longer to develop. Rather than pinning a happy ending on this odd duck finding love, it instead expresses enormous gratitude for the friends we meet along the way, who are patient enough to understand we are still under construction.

FRANCES HA is a great film to replace MANHATTAN as the classic black-and-white New York looking-for-love story, as the Allen film is almost unwatchable nowadays.

FILTH is the movie equivalent of being taken out for a night of drinking with a group of unruly guys who keep making you the butt of the joke as pat you on the back and reassure that they're just taking the piss out of you. It is a raucous movie that never slows down long enough for you to pinpoint whether it's serious or a dark and twisted joke.

That devil may care tone carries through all the way to the last scene, where it slows down and becomes heartfelt, only to pull the rug out from under you at breakneck speed for one last jab at the ribs.

Bob Fosse’s ALL THAT JAZZ vacillates between boozy confession and razzle-dazzle with wanton abandon. It is a movie made by someone who can’t help but be a showman even as he explores the subject of death.

It remains one of the only films to genuinely show the toll show business can take on an individual. This cautionary tale from a man who used and abused women, drugs, and alcohol and skated by on his charm has the power to make you admire this extremely flawed person even as he dances his way to oblivion.

If the internet were a thing when KISS ME DEADLY was released back in 1955, it would be the subject of countless videos on YouTube that promise “KISS ME DEADY: Ending Explained.”

Elements of this hard-boiled noir were lifted in films like LOST HIGHWAY and PULP FICTION. It remains a better-than-average film noir that builds to an ending that will forever be ingrained in the minds of anyone who has seen it.

PALINDROMES is technically a continuation of Todd Solondz's second feature, WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE, but if that eludes you, it's probably because he employs a gimmick where a different actress plays the main character from one scene to the next.

This film touches on such hot-button subjects as abortion, 9/11, and radical Christian fundamentalism. In the film's best scene, which seems directed at Solondz's harsh critics, one character insists, "I'm not a pedophile." To which another wryly responds, "I believe you, pedophiles love children."

Many people love to point at films and say, "that would never be made in today's climate," but it's a miracle any Solondz film was ever made. His movies are just as shocking as they were when they first assaulted viewers.

REAL LIFE was made as a spoof on a television program called AN AMERICAN FAMILY, but it also ended up prophesying many reality television troupes.

The directorial debut from Albert Brooks foretold how shows like BIG BROTHER would hide cameras as well as how meddling reality tv producers would coerce real-life talent into doing things entirely out of character. Brooks divined all of this in 1979 before the phrase "Reality TV" was even a thing.

In FIGHT CLUB, the men lament, "why do guys like you and I know what a duvet is?" Compare that to GONE GIRL, where yuppies Nick and Amy buy each other the same type of luxury 2,000 thread count bed sheets.

There may be a thematic connection in the bedcovers of the two David Fincher films. Whereas the former film envisioned men living without the creature comforts of life, scared of womanly influence, GONE GIRL shows women conquering men. But instead of winning the battle through force or fists, they lure men into comfy nests and strike with precision timing. If FIGHT CLUB was about guys worrying about losing their balls, GONE GIRL is about that fear manifested: it's one man's journey to being thoroughly neutered.

None of this even touches how fucking funny it is. Since Nick is set up to be such a tangle of rash masculinity, you are invited to feel good about giggling as he is firmly put in his place.

Ben Affleck is particularly remarkable in an often thankless kind of straight-man role. The people nominated for best actor or actress at any given Oscars are usually the people who cry the hardest, who shake and tremble with wild histrionics. Here Affleck is tasked with playing someone terrible at expressing how he feels. He is so bad at conveying his inner emotions that the entire plot turns when he shows his humanity and wins back the affection of his psychotic companion.

One of the first films to place you inside the head of a character and make you feel their anxiety. AFTER HOURS walked so UNCUT GEMS could run.

This film is about a guy having an awful night that captures that feeling of a minor problem snowballing into a disaster, a molehill growing into a mountain. Scorsese's indie plays like Kafka's THE TRIAL, but instead of some faceless authority torturing our hero, it's the ruthless SoHo district of New York in the mid-eighties.

Directly after skewering Hollywood with SUNSET BOULEVARD, Billy Wilder set his sights on the media.

ACE IN THE HOLE pulls back the veil on the relationship that exists between reporters and their stories, showing the thin line between reporting and manufacturing a story. The moral quandary Wilder dramatized here is years ahead of its time and more relevant now than ever.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING is a tale of two Freemasons who make themselves into God’s and suffer the consequences for their heresy.

The film plays like an allegory omitted from the bible. It's an old-fashioned cautionary tale about the wrath of a God who will smite those who build temples to themselves.

Spielberg's E.T. is a film dealing with feelings of abandonment and his parent's divorce through the story of a benevolent alien.

The film captured the world's imagination, and for over a decade, it was the highest-grossing film of all time. It may be the best example of a personal story achieving universal appeal.

I get it; the dialog is laughable, the main character is wooden, and it's basically smurfs in space. It's not even James Cameron's s best film by any stretch of the imagination, and most of the criticism leveled at its familiar plot is warranted.

But here is the thing, I think there's something ballsy about Cameron taking the decades of clout he built up as the trailblazer of financially successful films and spending all that credit on a movie that amounts to a gigantic "fuck you" to any colonizer that occupies territory and deprives the original inhabitants of their basic humanity and resources. And to boot, he bankrolled his screed with ultra-conservative 20th Century Fox cash.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE tells a tale about a brainwashed communist rendered an unwitting assassin by forces intent on overthrowing the US government.

A year later, Lee Harvey Oswald, a self-avowed communist, would assassinate President Kennedy. This timing is most likely a coincidence, although it is interesting to draw parallels between the fictional film and the real-life tragedy of 1963. THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE remains the mother of all political conspiracy movies and viewed with this historical context, it seems like a piece of predictive programming.

It is hard to imagine that ninety years ago, when Todd Browning cast real disabled people to star in his film FREAKS, it would ruin his career. Audiences were horrified by this cast of circus oddities.

Seen today, it’s amazing how ahead of its time the film is. Here is a movie that asks you to find humanity in the deformed outcasts and casts a critical light on Cleopatra, a traditionally beautiful woman on the outside who is rotten on the inside.

THE FLORIDA PROJECT envelops you in a sun-soaked world that is anchored by an outstanding performance by Bria Vinaite. Halley feels like someone we have all met in real life but who rarely shows up on the silver screen. This Florida girl is stubborn and immature but also hilarious and compulsively watchable.

Despite her less sympathetic qualities, the film still strives to make the social workers who come and snatch her daughter the bad guys. In a movie that seems to be building to a downer ending, the film breaks free from this fate and leaves you on an exhilarated high note.

BLUE VELVET shows us a girl named Sandy who is so pure she could be an extra from GREASE. It compares her with a jazz club singer, Dorothy, who is world-weary and surrounded by seedy characters. Jeffery, the clean boy scout, is juxtaposed with Frank, an ego-driven and hysterical maniac.

Even though Sandy is falling in love with Jeffery, he is lured back to the tormented Dorothy. Halfway through the film, Dorothy begs Jeffery to beat her, and he does.

BLUE VELVET seems to be trying to say that evil lives in all of us, that what makes us human is being able to flirt with the darkness but not to let it consume us. But never forget, the capacity to be evil is there, lurking just under the surface.

No film captures childhood like MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO. The animated movie follows two sisters as they traverse the nooks and crannies of their countryside estate. They eventually find the titular Totoro, a cuddly teddy bear of a beast.

The film depicts that sense of wanting to escape into imagination and avoid the natural world's problems, to snuggle up inside the belly of some warm monster and slowly drift into a mid-day nap.

PERSONA is the first film to plumb the depths of psychology on the silver screen. The seeds Bergman planted here gave way to post-modern masterpieces like MULHOLLAND DRIVE and FIGHT CLUB.

For a movie made in 1966, it still feels as fresh as the films it inspired.

Luis Buñuel was a real shit-disturber. Not content with pissing off the Catholic Church, the right-wing League of Patriots in France, and even the Pope, he further angered people by including secret Masonic hand gestures in THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL. Blink, and you'll miss them, but they are there.

The ridiculous tale centering on a group of wealthy guests who find themselves powerless to leave a dinner party works as the perfect deconstruction of high society morals that vanish the minute their comforts are threatened.

DUCK SOUP has jokes in it that will make you ask, "how on earth did they get away with saying that?" The answer may be speed, as the antics here come at you so fast, you may find yourself bewildered, much like the high society folks the Marx Brothers run circles around in this madcap political satire.

No gag is as iconic as the mirror set-piece near the end, where for absurdly complicated reasons, Pinky pretends to be Rufus T. Firefly's reflection. It's hilarious, but also balletic, and oddly moving for reasons I cannot explain.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE is one of the best-directed films of the last few years. It is a disgrace that it didn't get a single Oscar nomination.

The film about a portraiture artist hired to surreptitiously observe her subject uses its plot to train the viewer to see hidden details in art. All this leads to its ingenious two endings, one of which has our protagonist seeing another painter's representation of her muse, the hidden details of which send a secret message only she can understand. It shows how art can sometimes be meant for an audience of one.

By the film's actual conclusion, with the viewer trained to observe human posture, you are invited to watch someone for an extended duration and judge what you see. Is this bliss? Is this grief? What have you learned?

In essence, the film is a retelling of THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, but it may exceed the movie that inspired it. This tale of forbidden love feels unbearably romantic and genuinely personal.

THE THING has a creature that that can mimic anyone.

John Carpenter uses this shapeless monster that can replicate forms to tell a cold war era story about trust eroding in a small community.

Sam Raimi gave up the gore that defined his earlier films to deliver the most "normal" film of his career; A SIMPLE PLAN also happens to be one of his best.

It's a tale of people trying to live above their allotted class. The film slowly reveals that the main character's father acted as a literal human sacrifice to gain access to the insurance money that bought them this lifestyle. What is even more tragic is what needs to be sacrificed to keep that lifestyle going.

A SIMPLE PLAN is a heartbreaking story about greed consuming the American dream.

THE SONS OF SAM is an outstanding new Netflix documentary series. The first episode sums up what most people know about David Berkowitz's late seventies murder spree.

The next three episodes take you down a rabbit hole dealing with satanic death cults, Scientology, animal sacrifice, and snuff films. Even if half of this material is the product of a conspiratorial imagination, the way the story unravels is exhilarating.

No film has a more apt title than Jen Renoir’s THE GRAND ILLUSION. The film focuses on a prisoner of war camp during the first world war, which many consider the last gentleman’s war.

In showing how these prisoners from different areas of the world manage to get along and love one another, the film shines a light on the invisible lines powerful men draw in the sand to trick us into hating one another.

One of the reasons THE FLY has such staying power is because its central theme of decay acts as the perfect allegory for whatever you want to see in it.

You can interpret the film to be about the inevitability of death. You can see it as a film about how drug addiction ravages the body. You can interpret it as a film about falling out of love.

All these readings work because the film touches on a human problem we will never solve: that nothing lasts forever.

Shortly after confessing his uncertainties and adulteries in 8½, Federico Fellini made a film for his wife.

JULIET OF THE SPIRITS is a technicolor feast for the eyes in which the director urges his spouse to follow her lust while at the same time subtly warning her that she may burn in hell if she does.

Concentrating on the only policeman in a small town in French West Africa, COUP DE TORCHON is a study of emasculation.

No one respects the cop at the heart of the story, his wife openly cheats on him, some pimps flout his orders. This weakness bubbles up to a breaking point where the policeman kills the pimps. This starts him on a path of vengeance against those who wronged him.

It's a disquieting tale depicting law and order sliding into chaos.

After battling with the studios over THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and failing to complete his third film, IT'S ALL TRUE, Orson Welles was essentially a persona non grata in Hollywood.

Welles later adapted Kafka's THE TRIAL about a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote authority who works in the shadows. The film reveals Welles's state of mind, who twenty years earlier was the toast of the town, now an outcast for reasons he couldn't grasp.

There has been a lot written about how EVIL DEAD played like a horror film, and then EVIL DEAD 2 reinvented that same formula as a slapstick comedy, but Sam Raimi's DRAG ME TO HELL managed to be both hilarious and horrifying, sometimes in the same scene.

You would be hard-pressed to come up with a film that takes the audience from uproarious laughter to genuine terror with such aplomb. The comedy never diminishes the terror and vice versa. It's a singular accomplishment, a crowning achievement in the strange brand Raimi carved out for himself.

I saw this movie five times in the theater, but none of those times were as memorable as when I saw it at the Arclight in Hollywood, which is sadly closing its doors. It was not the movie theatre experience itself that made it so memorable; although that was top-notch, no, it was what happened immediately afterward.

I was with a group of friends in broad daylight discussing the film when this old woman walked out of the crowd towards us. She looked like the Gypsy from the film. This caught our attention, and with us all watching, she cupped her hands by her chin and popped one of her eyeballs out into her palm; she looked up at us with one eye in her hand and the other still in the socket and cackled.

To this day, I have no idea if it was a promotion for the film, part of a hidden-camera prank TV show, or what, but it made for one of the most arresting experiences of my life. It was like the movie was over, we had all left the theatre, but Raimi still had one last surprise in store for us.

A massive middle finger that doubles as caustic satire, THE CABIN IN THE WOODS is a movie exploring Hollywood's dependence on formula as if it's part of some ancient ritual.

The best sequence in the film compares what typically happens in the third act of a horror film; the final girl faces off with the monster, with office workers celebrating how they used the traditional method to achieve this samey result.

From there, the film dramatizes breaking free from what typically happens. The audience cheers as the would-be sacrificial lambs turn the tables on the formula-reliant Hollywood suits.

FACE/OFF has an absurd concept that works in the film's favor, with the central idea of face-swapping elevating the movie to Shakespearean heights.

Not only is it a great action film, with characters thrust into situations that get more and more desperate, but it also plays as a scenery-chewing comedy where the two actors get to mimic their counterparts' characteristics.

I wish I had enough shame to preface my love of FACE/OFF by assigning it the label of "guilty pleasure," but I don't. I just love it.

I, TONYA is a milestone in our mutual remembered history. It takes someone we all labeled a villain from years ago and casts her as a misunderstood victim. It speaks to society wrestling with its inherent sexism for us to go through such a drastic change of perspective in twenty years.

No scene is bolder than when Tonya addresses the camera and directly implicates us for the character lynching we all partook in. I, TONYA is revisionist history as entertainment. It's a film that moves at the speed of thought and leaves you dazzled.

THE EXORCIST goes to great lengths to make you forget you are watching a movie.

Let's start with the fact that Ellen Burstyn is playing an actress in the film. That fact alone situates you in a movie world where films exist. It's a minor detail, but in a movie that ends with a floating bed, the devil is in the details. This adherence to verisimilitude is evident from the casting of real priests and doctors in minor roles to the authentic reactions Friedkin extracted from these actors.

It's no wonder that audience members had such a physical reaction at the time, with people reportedly fainting in multiplexes; Friedkin had stripped away all the safety mechanisms that allow us to say "it's only a movie."

Look at the top-grossing films around the time THE DARK KNIGHT was released; TITANIC, SHREK 2, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, SPIDER-MAN. To anyone who wanted to make darker films, it seemed there was little to no room for you in the mainstream, let alone in the coveted slot of "blockbuster filmmaker." Enter Christopher Nolan with his sequel for BATMAN BEGINS.

THE DARK KNIGHT ends with Two-Face grabbing a child about the age of the target demographic for this kind of film, pointing a gun at his head, and seething "Tell your boy it's going to be all right. Lie... like I lied." It was a harrowing journey into the dark heart of America's failing war on terror.

This uncompromising vision skyrocketed to the top of the box office and became the second highest-grossing film of all time. It is hard to express just how exciting this was to a generation of filmmakers who didn't have any hope that there was a place for them in this industry. This film made anything seem possible; as long as it expressed something on the tip of everyone's tongue, it could bust blocks, no matter how dark.

I've always maintained that the raw power of Spike Lee's DO THE RIGHT THING comes purely from putting popular visuals of the era side-by-side. It opens with races co-existing together in what looks like an ad for The United Colors of Benetton.

Those aspirational visuals give way to riots, rage, police officers hosing down protestors, shops set on fire, wreckage, looting, and fury. Images ripped directly from headlines then and now.

The juxtaposition poses a question; how can we be both things at once? Or, as Samuel Jackson asks near the end of the film, "Are we gonna live together? Together are we gonna live?"

Friends, I cannot wait for a day to report that this film is a relic of a different era, a more tumultuous time.

It breaks my heart that we aren't there yet.

THE CRIMINAL LIFE OF ARCHIBALDO DE LA CRUZ is about a man who fantasizes about murder, and every time he has one of these dark visions, that person ends up dead in real life.

This mid-career film from the consistently excellent Luis Buñuel is a Freudian examination of Catholic guilt and touches on one of my favorite themes; that fantasies are normal; it's having these dark thoughts and not acting on them that makes us moral.

You can see this same theme explored in THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST and Gaspar Noé's I STAND ALONE, but this is the first film I can think of that examines it.

No moment in film history better exhibited the onset of hopelessness that would soon overtake American culture like the end of Robert Altman's NASHVILLE. Made between the two Kennedy assassinations, the film is a slice of life romp until its finale, where an assassin's bullet breaks up the gala for a would-be presidential candidate.

The stunned crowd watches in horror until they are exalted to ignore what they just saw and sing along to the lyrics; "It don't worry me, It don't worry me. You may say that I ain't free. But it don't worry me."

They play along, but a dark cloud had cast its shadow over the event, and even though the audience mouths the words, they seem unsure whether they truly believe them.

THE UPSIDE OF ANGER feels like a studio movie where some rebel snuck in the alternate ending that was never meant for public consumption.

The story of a middle-aged woman who refuses to let her husband's sudden departure get her down is secretly pitching its own belief system; a philosophy about persevering through difficult times with anger and resentment, refusing to accept the shitty hand you were dealt.

It's kind of like TERMS OF ENDEARMENT or ORDINARY PEOPLE by way of THE TWILIGHT ZONE. There aren't many films that pretend to be this normal until pulling the rug out from under you.

SEVEN SAMURAI is the grandfather of a myriad of films. The prototypes Kurosawa created here can be found in almost all modern action movies, and the directors he influenced before that all but admit they were stealing directly from him.

This film's secret ingredient that elevates it above most of its imitators is the level of reverence it has for warriors.

By the end of the film, the remaining Samurai pay respects to their fallen brothers. The peasants work the field, safe for another year, and it feels as if the next generation will never know the sacrifices made for them. Few movies have captured the honor of finding a cause worth dying for.

Luis Buñuel is one of the rare directors who just got better with age, and his swan song is amongst his best movies.

THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE has two separate women play the lead; this piece of stunt casting captures the inner thoughts of the male, who wants desperately to control this woman, only to find himself bewildered when she walks out the door and returns a moment later played by a completely different starlet.

Like EYES WIDE SHUT, also made by someone in the twilight of their life, THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE is Buñuel admitting that for all the wisdom that supposedly comes with old age, he still does not understand women in the slightest.

NIGHT MOVES should be mentioned alongside CHINATOWN for accurately probing the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles. It's the kind of story that could only be told in the City of Angels. It has sly stuntmen using their dangerous craft to make murders look like freak accidents, a juvenile girl stealing her mother's lover, and a hot-headed detective who may be going down this rabbit hole for wholly personal reasons.

It also builds to one of the most stunning set pieces in film history, with everything falling apart in a way that answers your questions while still portraying the existential dread consuming our detective.

It is proof of just how good a director Edgar Wright is that SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD bombing didn't even put a dent in his career trajectory. This movie made virtually no money theatrically, but you watch it, and there is no denying the level of talent and love behind each and every shot; and because people could sense that love, they didn't blame Mr. Wright for the film's performance.

The other thing the film does not get enough credit for is absolutely nailing Toronto, which is a city that can feel like a small town, the kind of place where everybody knows everyone's business, and when you start dating someone new, you inevitably end up running into their ex's on the regular.

THE VANISHING is probably the bleakest love story ever put to film. It's about a man who becomes fixated on discovering what happened to his girlfriend after she disappears.

The film understands how needing answers can become self-flagellation, that sympathizing with someone who was taken from you means needing to learn precisely what was done to them, even if what was done to them is horrific.

The most haunting thing about the film is its bookends. It starts with the woman who eventually will go missing recounting her dreams about drifting through space in a golden egg. In the most recent dream, an egg containing another person appeared.

The film ends with a newspaper story about the disappearances, the headline shows the lovers each in egg-shaped ovals. It's an image that is both deeply tragic and weirdly romantic.

Filmmakers are often told to "make the stakes higher," and if you have ever seen THE WAGES OF FEAR, that note can be frustrating because no film has higher stakes than this one.

The movie about a group of down on their luck men hired to drive two trucks loaded with nitroglycerine over mountain dirt roads has a plot device built into it that means one wrong move and the characters can explode at any minute.

Try and come up with stakes higher than that; it's impossible.

All the most memorable scenes in MULHOLLAND DRIVE tell you precisely what is about to happen, but for some reason, it's still shocking when that thing happens.

"There is a man, in back of this place. He's the one who's doing it," and then the film shows you this petrifying man, and it's still surprising. "There is no band; it's all an illusion," and yet when the singer stops singing, you watch in disbelief, still swept up in the melody.

It's the film that got me into filmmaking, which is somewhat ridiculous because everything about MULHOLLAND DRIVE is begging you to stay away from LA. Much like the scenes I mentioned, it tells you what will happen, so I guess no one should be caught off guard when the illusion fades, and all that is left is horrifying people roaming the streets.

But who knows, maybe I'm overthinking it, perhaps the reason the film spoke to me was that there's a Director character named Adam who ends up with Naomi Watts. One can still dream.

The Japanese horror film PULSE is about people appearing as phantoms on their computer screens shortly after killing themselves. Initially made to comment on rising suicide rates in Japan, the 2001 film prophesied humankind's growing dependence on technology.

With people locked in rooms staring at screens, it's a film worth reexamining with new eyes.

I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS has the most manipulative plot twist in film history. If you have not seen it, I'm going to spoil it, so consider yourself warned.

The film presents a bleak and miserable scenario, with characters just scraping by, trying to make the best of their meager lot in life. The twist comes when we realize the characters we have been watching are really representations of a severely depressed person's inner thoughts. The first half of the film has been his best attempt at envisioning a better life, but he is incapable of doing even that. Eventually, his fantasies turn on him and start speaking in his negative inner voice, a nagging voice that says "end it all."

For the most depressing movie of 2020, the film also includes the most hilarious moment from any film released that year, a parody of romantic comedies purportedly directed by Robert Zemeckis, which had me on the floor laughing at how absurd it is.

In 1981 John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate then-President Ronald Reagan. Hinckley was obsessed with TAXI DRIVER and sought fame to impress Jodi Foster. Martin Scorsese avoided commenting on his movie inspiring such a horrific event. Still, when pressed on the issue, he replied, "What am I supposed to do, stop making movies?"

Lucky for us, he did not stop making movies, and only a year later, he made THE KING OF COMEDY. To anyone paying attention, this was Scorsese commenting on the Hinckley incident. The memorably named Rupert Pupkin at the center of THE KING OF COMEDY also seeks fame and resorts to violence to get it.

Rather than lay the blame squarely at the feet of the mentally ill Pupkin, the film points the finger at our fame-obsessed society.

FULL METAL JACKET has a structure like no other and it serves a reasonably simple goal; to show two different outcomes to brainwashing.

The first half that focuses on "Gomer Pyle" shows how the Marine Corps breaks someone down who cannot handle it. Here, Kubrick is showing us an example of unsuccessful brainwashing.

The second half, which follows "Joker," shows us successful brainwashing. Once Joker "pops his cherry" and kills the injured Vietnamese child, he has been fully programmed.

The image depicting this indoctrination is that of Joker mixing in with his fellow Marines as silhouettes while singing the "Mickey Mouse March" in eerie unison.

Rewatching BEETLEJUICE, and you can't help but notice how punk rock it is. It casually introduces children to death in its first half, then occult seances in its second.

Yet the most punk thing about it is acts as a gateway drug for kids to get into horror films. At least, that's how it happened for me.

The seemingly contradictory thing that makes 8 ½ a masterpiece is that it has the spirit of a story improvised, but the aesthetics of something planned down to the very last detail. It's no mistake that this film about a director suffering a lack of self-confidence happens to be one of the most assured films ever made.

Directors like Cassavetes were always able to capture great performances, but sometimes at the detriment of aesthetics, other directors could create gorgeous visuals, but the acting suffered.

8 ½ represents the gold standard of performance and aesthetics coming together, creating an intoxicating fusion that proved you did not have to sacrifice one for the other. You can see this influence on directors like Scorsese, who made a career out of achieving this perfect fusion of performance and visuals.

Effortlessly replicating the effects of the drug most prominently featured in it, GOODFELLAS is exactly like cocaine. Once you start watching it, it's pretty hard to stop.

Federico Fellini was married to his lead actress Giulietta Masina when they made NIGHTS OF CABIRIA together.

She gives a performance worthy of comparison to Chaplin's Tramp in this, the original story of the hooker with a heart of gold.

The revelation in ARRIVAL has you understand a sacrifice in reverse.

Superficially a movie about a woman teaching an alien race our language, the film's hidden ambition is to make the audience understand the alien's unconventional way of observing time. A powerful movie that can have you see the world with new eyes if you allow it to take hold of you.

THE IDIOTS is about a troupe who engages in "spassing," which is behaving in public like they're developmentally disabled.

In this early Dogme 95 film, Lars Von Trier finds the perfect way to satirize the performing arts world.

The script for THE TRUMAN SHOW by Andrew Niccol had the same fantastic premise that you see in the finished product, but it was vastly different. His version was set in New York, with a guerilla camera crew following the titular character around.

Enter Peter Weir, who reconceptualizes the whole premise. He writes a backstory chronicling how the God-like Christof went from being a little-known installation artist to imagining an entire town on a soundstage. This document became the blueprint for a brand-new version of THE TRUMAN SHOW.

Still, his contributions do not end there, as THE TRUMAN SHOW deserves acclaim for being one of the best directed films of all time. Every shot in this film has a philosophy behind it. It's as if Weir made a rule book of the fictional show's boundaries and directed the movie as if he only had the tools at Christof's disposal. It's a testament to how a director's vision can transform a good idea into something extraordinary.

THE FAVOURITE passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. Its female characters are no shrinking violets and often outright tell the foppish men surrounding them to “fuck off” as they solve things autonomously.

I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that the long-gestating script was finally made at the height of the Brexit debate. By the end of the film, when Queen Anne orders Emma Stone’s Abigail to kneel and massage her legs, it plays as a warning about the current political climate, one that declares: “unless you’re serving England, you’re completely disposable.”

Stanley Kubrick foreshadowed his own slide into obsessive-compulsive thinking with his early offering, THE KILLING.

The film is all about control. It fills you in on the details regarding the preparation and execution of a racetrack heist where macho lead Johnny Clay controls everything down to the very last detail.

Then, in the final moments, with a suitcase filled with cash and a plane on the tarmac, Johnny hesitantly relaxes his need to control for a brief moment, only to see his dreams blow away in the wind.

The message is crystal clear from Kubrick: giving up even an iota of control leads to suffering.

THE DIRTY DOZEN is all fun and games until it sideswipes you with an "all bets are off" third act.

The film conditions you to think war is just a game with a light capture the flag second act. In the third act, members of the "dozen" start dropping like flies. For as playful as this film is, it never sugarcoats how savage war is.

Let's get this out of the way, they kill real animals in CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, and it's abhorrent, repugnant, and demands a severe warning.

Usually, that is where the discussion would end, but CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is, regrettably, still an important film. For starters, it basically spearheaded the "found footage" genre that would later be made famous by THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.

But it's the film's controversial release that demonstrates its dark power. You see, when the film was first screened, people thought that the actors who die on screen were killed in real life. This wasn't some PR stunt; the director was charged with murder and was jailed until he could prove the film's actors were still alive. It was not until weeks later, when the actors appeared on an Italian television show, that the charges were officially dropped.

This may all sound like an overreaction, but if you make it to the final twenty minutes of HOLOCAUST, you will understand why they charged this man with murder. You may want to do it yourself.

The film so nice they made it twice, Michael Haneke's FUNNY GAMES has the novel characteristic of being the only movie that basically dares you to stop watching it. According to the provocative director, you need the film to continue if you do not shut it off.

I've watched FUNNY GAMES more than ten times between the two versions and have yet to turn it off. Guess I'm hooked.

The thing that chilled me to the core when I first saw HEREDITARY is illustrated by the conventional definition of its title; the passing on of traits from parents to their offspring

With that in mind, the film is about a little girl who makes crude dolls using thimbles and wire. A mother, who makes lifelike dollhouses that win her recognition as a noted miniature artist, and a grandmother, who doesn't even need art supplies for her projects; she uses her family as the props.

If everyone in GOOD TIME ignored everything Robert Pattinson's character told them to do, the film would have a happy ending.

Juxtapose that with UNCUT GEMS, where if everyone would just shut the fuck up and do everything Adam Sandler's character wants, the movie would end with everyone getting their money and living happily ever after.

I didn't like GOOD TIME when I first saw it. To me, it was a film about a narcissist who destroys everything he comes in touch with. But I was blown away by UNCUT GEMS, and I think it's because in that film, instead of watching the character's blunders pile up like a car crash in slow motion, you see it through the perspective of Adam Sandler's Howard Ratner.

UNCUT GEMS places you inside the mind of a gambler; you're with the guy who sees all the angles, his wheels turn so fast no one else can keep up, and then, in a blinding flash, it's too late -- the wheel stops spinning.

These two films viewed together showcase two dramatically different ways to tell the same story. They taught me that even if your protagonist is delusional, I'd prefer to be invited in to share in their delusion.

Before the word binged meant to consume a large amount of media all at once, film nerds "binged" Krzysztof Kieślowski's DEKALOG.

The polish mini-series is ten-hour long anecdotes, each of which represents one of the Ten Commandments. There are no lousy episodes and some all-out terrific ones.

What makes it an enduring masterpiece is that the series is not just a retelling of the moral teachings outlined in the Commandments. Instead, each story serves as an annotation to the lesson. So, where the Commandment might read "Thou shalt not covet," in the DEKALOG, it plays out more like "Though shalt not covet, but what about in these unusual circumstances?" For a series with a goal of modernizing the Bible's lessons, its reach miraculously does not exceed its grasp.

Hal Ashby's THE LAST DETAIL chronicles two Navy Signalmen assigned a detail escorting 18-year-old kid across state lines to serve out an eight-year prison sentence.

It's a road trip movie, and like most road trip movies, the characters find themselves engaged in hilarious shenanigans, where they grow close and form a bond. It's so merry and boisterous that it genuinely tricks you into thinking all this will have a happy ending, one where friendship wins out over duty.

This makes it all the more shocking when they reach their destination and unceremoniously haul the 18-year-old kid off to prison. It's a poignant film that may give you whiplash as it plays with your expectations.

David Lynch's name is synonymous with "weird," but he does not get enough praise for exploring complex themes usually reserved for literature.

In TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN, he perfectly expresses the Buddhist concept that "all suffering comes from craving," something I am sure Agent Dale Cooper is familiar with.

The last two episodes showcase this, with the penultimate episode showing good winning over evil in an epic showdown that seems almost too good to be true.

The final episode lingers on the characters after the bliss of victory fades and gives way to more craving. As Agent Cooper embarks on his quest to return Laura Palmer home and repair order in the universe, he comes to see that you can never truly go home again.

DEEP END, released in 1970, is a coming-of-age story set in a lurid bathhouse, where a kid falls in love with a young girl who has many suitors vying for her affection. It's like TAXI DRIVER with training wheels.

With ALIENS, James Cameron answered the question of how to make the next film bigger and better by asking, "so, where do these eggs come from?"

It's a natural solution that feels organic and inevitable. Cameron delivers one of the most pulse-pounding returns to a franchise in film history by simply developing the Xenomorph lifecycle.

Gaspar Noé sums up any message derived from CLIMAX by simply saying, "Alcohol makes you stupid." In the same interview, he grumbles about how he nearly drugged himself to death and is thankful to be alive after years of wild partying. This outlook seems to fit with the film, which isn't so much about one specific party that happened in the mid-'90s, as it is about the party lifestyle in general.

The film starts with a showstopping bang; everything is exciting, but like most parties by the middle, people get into stupid arguments, and communication is breaking down. By the film's final third, only the diehard druggies are left dancing as the cops kick in the daylight bathed door to signal the end of the evening's festivities. The film has the same structure as any wild party, most of which end with a whimper and not a bang.

My favorite story about Noé comes from IRREVERSIBLE. Legend has it that Noé showed that film to Dario Argento early on before many people had seen it. Argento loved the film but warned Noé to be prepared for a critical backlash because of an ultraviolent scene at a gay leather bar. Argento cited how the critics tore William Friedkin to pieces and labeled him homophobic for similar material in CRUISING some years earlier. Noé respected Argento and knew he had a point, so he started dabbling with the idea of editing down the scene to show less of the gay leather bar. But editing it down was diminishing the scene's power.

Here is the solution Noé ultimately came up in his own words:" So I had an idea, and we went back to the club, and I added a small image of me masturbating as part of the club. It was stupid, but still, everybody noticed that I was part of the club, so I could not be homophobic while being excited while in the club." That was his fix; he got his crew back out to the bar to shoot an insert shot of him masturbating wearing leather. What a treasure this man is.

Watching certain films from the '30s might make you think the sexual revolution happened much earlier than it actually did.

In BRINGING UP BABY, Katharine Hepburn runs circles around Cary Grant. She is self-assured, knows what she wants right from the get-go, and does not take "no" for an answer as she pursues it. Men and women seem more equal in films made in the '30s than they did in the decades that followed.

No film shows that "there's a fine line between genius and insanity" more than Terry Zwigoff's CRUMB.

The documentary gives you three members of the Crumb family, one of whom was able to channel his brand of insanity into an illustrious art career. The other Crumb's are less successful at crossing that "fine line," and as the doc progresses, you see them drift slowly into madness.

THE WORLD'S END is my favorite film in Edgar Wright's Cornetto trilogy. The film starts as an uncomfortable comedy about arrested development, only to become something entirely different by its conclusion. What makes it so rewarding is revising it knowing where it's going. A second viewing reveals how dense every line of dialog is. Every word spoke in the first half is shown to have double or even triple meaning by the end of the film.

The cheeky comedy elevates a pup crawl to the level of myth. It starts with a character who remembers the past through rose-colored glasses, seeing his gang of friends as legends in their own time. Rather than learning and growing, our hero gets so pissed by the end of the pub crawl that he musters the nerve to tell the baddies to "fuck off." Surprisingly this plan works, and by the film's post-apocalyptic coda, people whisper stories about that now-infamous pup crawl like it's some Arthurian legend.

SHUTTER ISLAND puts you inside the head of a person with schizophrenia. The film understands that paranoid people do not see their fantasies as outlandish, that the stories they construct are weirdly plausible.

The film is filled to the brim with contradictory information. It is deliberately confusing. Scorsese himself referred to SHUTTER ISLAND as an "experimental film," and it is, in that it successfully tells two stories concurrently.

It tells one story of an experimental therapy foisted on Teddy to save him from shock therapy. It also tells the story of Teddy's paranoia, the niggling sense of doubt that will not leave him. In telling these two stories simultaneously, the film fractures the mind, empathizing with its protagonist to the point of accepting the reason he eventually relapses.

Having not seen PUMPING IRON for years, I seemed to remember that Lou Ferrigno was much shorter than his body-building rival Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that Ferrigno stands 6 ft 6, whereas Schwarzenegger is 6 ft 1. Arnie’s constant shit-talking all through the documentary somehow makes Ferrigno seem smaller. PUMPING IRON surprisingly says a lot about the power of self-confidence.

Sam Fuller's SHOCK CORRIDOR is more influential than people give it credit for. The surreal burlesque sequence looks like something that may have inspired ERASERHEAD. A black character fancies himself a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a concept later used for comedy gold in CHAPPELLE’S SHOW, and the film had an obvious impact on SHUTTER ISLAND, also set in a mental hospital.

It's also laugh-out-loud funny, with most of the comedy coming from a Pulitzer Prize-hungry reporter intentionally committing himself to a mental hospital and trying to extract confessions from a string of characters who prove to be increasingly more insane.

Movies allow us to process complex emotions, presenting heroes and villains that serve as ciphers for us to understand our ever-changing morality. But what if it took a movie to make it clear that you were the villain?

That is the question at the center of THE ACT OF KILLING a documentary where the barbarous perpetrators of the Indonesian killings are asked to recreate the genocide on film.

After seeing what he did enact as fiction, Anwar Congo repeatedly retches as a literal gag reflex and a sign of intense guilt. The documentary speaks to the power of the human mind to repress our most uncomfortable thoughts and instead paint ourselves as the hero of our own stories, even when that story involves over a million people being killed.

I remember when Paul Verhoeven came to AFI to show STARSHIP TROOPERS he playfully explained that the film had “its own 9/11 before 9/11 had actually happened” when describing the Arachnid attack that annihilates the city of Buenos Aires, and sends our young heroes off to war.

A lot has been written about the satire of TROOPERS, but it’s hard to describe just how firmly Verhoeven’s tongue is planted in his cheek here. Watching the film nowadays, it’s like an adaptation of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, but one directed with the full approval of the war-wounded elders who lead the younger generation to war. The film somehow manages to transcend labels like “satire.” Instead, it plays like a film commissioned as an actual piece of propaganda from this future, one that has the task of preparing these youngsters for the harsh realities that await them in the bug war.

It’s no coincidence that love interest characters who let their guard down and express genuine vulnerability are the same ones who end up bug food. It’s like the ending of 1984 but delivered as a bittersweet word of warning, one that says; “weakness gets you killed here.” By the time Neil Patrick Harris comes out in full SS garb to cheerfully declare that the brain bug is afraid, the fascistic transformation is complete.

I remember Verhoeven mischievously saying how people approach him and earnestly say they joined the army because of this film, and how when this happens, he must stop himself from giggling. Verhoeven may have done his job too well; the recruitment worked.

What an unenviable job it must have been to follow up the then highest-grossing movie of all time and instant classic JAWS. The blood was in the water and the critics at the time were not kind to its unavoidable sequel, which was unduly written off as a soulless cash grab. It’s too bad because JAWS 2 is a wonderful film.

After the events of the first film, it’s easy to imagine Brody and city-boy Hooper swimming ashore and sharing the tale of what happened in the middle of the ocean only to be met with cockeyed stares from fellow fishermen, who I’m sure would respond by saying; “so you fed the shark a scuba cylinder and blew it up, you say?”

JAWS 2 taps into this, painting Martin Brody as an increasingly paranoid lunatic, seeing sharks wherever he goes, in the shadows cast from a school of bluefish, or in a close-up photo from a camera recovered near the Orca. The paranoia leads to Brody being unceremoniously removed from his post, leaving him in desperate need of redemption.

And he gets it when he ventures out to sea to obliterate yet another killer shark, only this time in front of an audience of teenage witnesses who will now surely come back to shore and tell the tale of how Sheriff Brody bravely saved the island of Amity from a monster that lurked in the depths.

Like THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and the original DAWN OF THE DEAD, GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH is a film characterized almost entirely by its setting.

The Trump/Turner-inspired Clamp Center at the center of GREMLINS 2 is the kind of invented structure that would feel at home in a Jacques Tati film. It’s the kind of place where a genetics laboratory is nonchalantly stacked on top of a television studio. Here, the setting provides the perfect excuse to deliver a string of Looney Tunes-inspired gag-a-minute laughs, where the Gremlins wreak havoc on man’s dependence on technology.

THE LIGHTHOUSE was released a bit before quarantine and became more relatable as the real world forced us into close quarters with friends and family.

The entire thing plays like STRANGERS ON A TRAIN or countless other films from the fifties, the kind of films where much ink has been spilled on “underlying themes of repressed homosexuality.” Except, in THE LIGHTHOUSE, these themes are more than just hinted at. The film cuts rapidly between surly brawls to what seems like pillow talk, from kerosene-drunk fights to hallucinatory merman sex.

What makes the film so bold is this touchy subject matter is shamelessly played for laughs. If you have a gallows humor, THE LIGHTHOUSE is just as funny as THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY, particularly if you’ve ever lived with male roommates.

JAWS is a bit unfairly credited for demonstrating the horror mantra that “what you don't see is scarier than what you do,” but Robert Wise’s THE HAUNTING remains the purest expression of this.

It’s a ghost story built on dread that remains one of the scariest horror films to this date and it’s fueled almost entirely on expectation and anticipation.

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN is a bubblegum-pop revenge fantasy elevated by its closing act. So many payback films focus on the central character’s physical strength. Here is a film that subverts that notion, putting on a pedestal a woman who can outwit and outsmart. In this film, brute force and unconstrained rage are the Achilles heel that bring down the villain.

It's a perverse take on female solidarity that somehow manages to be a dazzling downer and a crowd-pleaser all at once.

GREEN ROOM came along in 2015 and completely reinvented the sub-genre of “DIE HARD” on a (fill in the blank.) The film works as a well-oiled anxiety machine because of its adherence to realism. Every decision seems to have been run through a filter of a filmmaker asking himself “what would happen in real life?”

It also has the distinction of having villains so intelligent that they authentically outmaneuver both the characters in the film, and the audience itself. Watching the bad guy’s master plan come together is exhilarating because it is both imaginative and unspoken.

Here is a movie that for once has villain’s so sharp that they are reluctant to speak their plans into words, a far cry from the worn cliché of the big baddy who feels the need to expound on his or her villainy. The fact that the neo-Nazis at the center of GREEN ROOM are shrewder than anyone else in the film makes it that much more satisfying to see their best laid plans crumble.

Up there with my top ten desert island movies for sure.

Catherine Breillat’s FAT GIRL depicts how boys will say anything to seduce young girls and contrasts that with a brutal rape, only to boldly declare “it’s the same thing.”

Steven Soderbergh made a thematic trilogy in THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE, BEHIND THE CANDELABRA and LET THEM ALL TALK.

After three films, the director seems to have come to the depressing conclusion that all relationships are transactional, and that fame makes meaningful connections nearly impossible. It’s a bitter outlook, but one that seems to come from experience.

Though undeniably difficult to follow on first viewing, INHERENT VICE ultimately reveals itself to be a simple shaggy dog comedy about a lonely stoner who accidentally overthrows the illuminati to be with his lady friend.

Spielberg’s WAR OF THE WORLDS is his bleakest film this side of SCHINDLER’S LIST. It captures what my nightmares feel like. It is a dark and troubling meditation on what it would feel like to be exterminated.

I don’t think people remember just how effective M. Night Shyamalan’s SIGNS was when it first played to packed houses in the summer of 2002. Much like its tense violin score, the film was a well-tuned scare machine that triggered audiences to erupt in jolts of terror at precision-planned moments.

What’s more shocking is how purposely divisive the film's ending is. This is a big-budget studio picture that builds to an almost experimental conclusion.

During a scene at the heart of the film, Mel Gibson’s lapsed Catholic priest whispers that “people break down into two groups. When they experience something lucky, group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence, they see it as a sign… Group number two sees it as just pure luck.”

The ending serves as a depiction of this sermon. The solution to defeating the invading aliens comes to the hero as a moment of spiritual clarity, suddenly all the traumas of the past are imbued with special meaning and nothing is seen as coincidence. To a skeptical viewer, all of this runs the risk of coming off as complete hooey.

How it plays is completely dependent on which of the aforementioned categories you fall into. Shyamalan was brave enough to split the audience right down the middle.

UTOPIA focuses on a group of graphic novel aficionados who, in the pages of “The Utopia Manuscript,” uncover a sinister plot that involves releasing a deadly virus to cull a too rapidly expanding population.

Among many things, the show touches on the notion of using art to warn an oblivious public about what is to come. Like the manuscript at the center of its plot, UTOPIA is destined to become the subject of conspiracies itself, since it was released well before our own unfortunate foray into the world of deadly viruses.

If all of this sounds like it hits a little too close to home, watch it for its cinematography. For my money it’s the best-looking thing released in the last ten years.

No film has a more visual structure than Sam Peckinpah’s BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA.

The film starts with a Mexican crime lord brutalizing his teenage daughter to find out the name of the man who impregnated her. The man is Alfredo Garcia; the crime lord puts a bounty on his head; this gets the attention of Bennie, a scoundrel who sees this as easy money, as he knows Alfredo Garcia is already dead. Things do not go as planned, and some bandits cruelly kill Bennie’s lover near Alfredo's gravesite. The film then follows Bennie as he travels back to the Mexican crime lord with the recently exhumed head of Alfredo Garcia by his side.

The movie starts at one point, takes us on a journey to Alfredo Garcia’s grave, only to take us back to where it all started. The simple structure shows how one act of carnage leads to another, creating an endless cycle of violence.

Bob Fosse’s STAR 80 is so bleak and unenjoyable that it doesn’t even retain the status of cult film, it’s too nasty to amass even a small group of people willing to admit they like it. Instead, it is a film you suffer through and survive. It’s a cautionary tale with almost no audience.

The real-life players involved in the tragic murder of Playboy Centerfold Dorothy Stratten knew this, and they all but begged Fosse to not make the picture. When that failed, Hugh Hefner sued, but Fosse was undeterred. He had something deeply unpleasant to say and, doggone it, he was going to say it.

Fosse famously told Eric Roberts about the reprehensible character of Paul Snider he was portraying that “you're playing me if I wasn't successful.” Which is a pretty freaking unsettling thing to say about someone who turned a shotgun on his once protégé and then himself.

And yet, in our current world, which throws terms like “toxic masculinity” around too easily, STAR 80 can be used as a teaching tool; most of the people depicted here are actually worthy of such a label.

Luis Buñuel was so sure that his first film with Salvador Dali, UN CHIEN ANDALOU, was going to be poorly received that he kept stones in his pocket to throw at any cinemagoer who might take it upon themselves to attack the young filmmakers. Much to their surprise, the surrealist film was met with euphoric applause.

However, a year later, the duo’s worst fears were realized when L’AGE D’OR premiered, and the screening was by interrupted by people throwing ink at the cinema screen and assaulting viewers who opposed them. After the incident, film was banned from further public exhibition.

MANK is about how biting the hand that feeds can somehow both ruin your career in Hollywood and produce the greatest film ever made.

Decades after the dust had settled from the disastrous reception of his film L’AGE D’OR, Buñuel was lured back to his native country of Spain as part of a goal to create a unique brand of Spanish cinema. Thinking the days of censorship were behind him, Buñuel made the audacious VIRIDIANA.

The film was promptly denounced by the Vatican as an insult not only to Catholicism but to Christianity in general. It was banned in Spain for the next seventeen years, and the two Spanish production companies that dared to make it were disbanded. Buñuel never worked in Spain again.

NATURAL BORN KILLERS is linked to nearly 10 copycat killings. The film was so controversial that novelist John Grisham dabbled with the idea of pinning murder charges on Oliver Stone, the film’s director. These would have been like the charges brought against Charles Manson, which seems fitting, since the only remaining dialog from Quentin Tarantino’s original draft of KILLERS seems torn from the lips of Manson himself.

NATURAL BORN KILLERS perfectly captures Marshall McLuhan’s famous adage “the medium is the message.” I mean, even if the film does not inspire you to kill, there is no denying the awe-inspiring pull of Mickey and Mallory Knox. In adopting these manipulative tactics, the film shows the power media has is to turn morality upside down, to portray the good guys as bad guys and vice versa. Yes, KILLERS proves it’s point by employing the same methods it is criticizing, but it’s frightening how well it works, by the climax you may find yourself rooting for the homicidal lovers to escape. This is admittedly satire by way of blunt instrument, but sometimes you need a hammer to the skull to get your point across.

Or as Leonard Coen mourns on the film’s soundtrack, as the bad guys ride off into the sunset like a demonic scourge released upon the world; "I've seen the future, brother, and it is murder"

In his own peculiar way, Quentin Tarantino may have signaled that he matured into a third phase as a filmmaker with ONCE UPON A TIME IN… HOLLYWOOD.

Young Tarantino probably could not fathom making a film about the famously verbose Charles Manson that neglects Manson himself. Based on the dialog in NATURAL BORN KILLERS alone, Tarantino seems to be a student of Manson’s infamous prison interview with Geraldo Rivera.

Could it be that when Tarantino was an outsider, he viewed Manson as a kind of anti-folk hero, but now that he’s a Hollywood insider, he views Manson and his band of hippies as a nuisance, trespassing, ruining his perfectly mixed margarita.

Having said that, there are little clues peppered throughout HOLLYWOOD that show Tarantino may not have strayed too far from his iconoclastic mindset. Late in the film, right before the infamous murders are expected to play out, we cut to a back and white TV that shows a woman comforting a wolf-man as she says; "I love you too, Charles."

Then there is the fact that in Tarantino’s version of how events unfold, Manson would have surely evaded justice, as it wouldn’t have been such a highly publicized case, just a couple of hippies that got burnt up.

Then, there is the very curious choice of the jersey Sharon Tate is wearing in the last shot of the film, which seems like a directorial flourish, or maybe a clue, for overzealous film nerds like me.

It’s weird, you look at the streets of America today, and they’re a vision of the “Helter Skelter” race-riots that Manson convinced his followers would unfold, and you can’t help but think; maybe he was just off by a few decades.

The reason A CLOCKWORK ORANGE will have an enduring legacy is that it expresses something that remains provocative to this day with absolute clarity. The film says that our capacity to enact violence is freedom, and that anything done to stifle this ability is tantamount to tyranny.

In his war epic Christopher Nolan jettisons the exposition that hampered some of his previous work and edits free-form between disparate time and events. DUNKIRK is like listening to a jazz musician riff using themes and chords he established in his previous career.

Nolan is a structuralist, and after successfully slowing the metronome of time to a standstill at the end of DUNKIRK, it feels appropriate that his next film deals with time moving backwards.

It is unfortunate that TENET is being released in the time of Corona, the critics seem to be judging the film with that in mind. No matter how it does at the box office, Christopher Nolan should rest assured that he has joined the pantheon of great directors if his films are now evaluated by whether they are worth dying for.

Darren Aronofsky made MOTHER! with Paramount after reportedly having a dispute with the producers of NOAH over whether the titular character should kill the baby at the end of the biblical epic.

You can almost imagine the producer pleading, saying; “Darren, please, I’ll let you do anything, you can make another movie with us, anything, but I beg you, don’t have Noah kill the baby at the end of this movie.”

Darren looks up with an impish look in his eye; “Any movie, you say?” And in that moment, MOTHER! was born. I mean, maybe it didn't go down exactly like that, but it’s the only logical way to explain how something this loopy ever made it to the silver screen.

Look no further than the films Roman Polanski made in America for proof that thoughts become reality, that life imitates art.

ROSEMARY’S BABY, THE TENANT, and REPULSION all deal with paranoia. Whether it is the suspicion of a satanic cult coming for your first born child, as it is in ROSEMARY’S BABY, or notion that people are covertly conspiring against you, as the characters in THE TENANT and REPULSION begin to suspect.

These films are portals into a troubled mind, where an artist’s darkest thoughts are laid bare.

Within a few years of them being made, an actual satanic cult had killed Polanski’s wife and her unborn child, a few years after that, Polanski fled America after sexually abusing a minor, ostracized by everyone, just like the character he portrayed in THE TENANT.

As the saying goes: “it’s not paranoia if they’re really after you.”

After Uma Thurman suffered a close call car accident on the set of KILL BILL, Quentin Tarantino’s response was to strap himself and Uma’s stunt double to the fastest car he could find and make DEATH PROOF.

This film has grown on me, especially viewing it knowing Tarantino himself is credited as cinematographer. Does anyone know if he was riding along for some of the stunt shots? I like to think he was as a way of experiencing what Uma went through, maybe his eccentric way of saying “I’m sorry.”

Who knows, we all deal with trauma in strange ways.

Don't be fooled by the moodiness of ENEMY, it's a comedy if you watch it in the right light. Jake Gyllenhaal, who is in on the joke, gives two of his best performances.

I mean, here is a film where two dudes discover they are each other’s doppelgangers and within a day from that, one says to the other, totally deadpan; "You're gonna give me your clothes and your car, I'm gonna take your girlfriend on a little romantic getaway.”

The film is filled with awkward moments that perfectly depict what women find attractive in men, and how often it’s the exact opposite of what men expect. The film also has a lot to say about weakness, and strength, and how both are a state of mind.

Most horror films are subject to the same criticism; a character on screen ends up wandering through some shadowy locale and people in the audience scream: “why would he/she do that!” It is so common that it has become a cliché.

DON’T LOOK NOW ingeniously solves the problem by telling a story of someone gifted with psychic powers but who remains stubbornly oblivious of his gift. Since the audience is also ignorant of his abilities, we fail to recognize them as such. So instead of watching this horror film and thinking “why would he do that” we instead think “that is exactly what I would do” even as people wander into increasingly more dimly lit locations.

It’s a brilliant device that the film uses to string you along till the very last minute, where everything coalesces in one horrific moment. It is a twist that touches on a primal fear; that maybe we did not follow the right path. That perhaps we did everything wrong.

What we are left with is a cautionary tale about being so skeptical of the hidden mysteries of this world that we fail to interpret the signs as they cry out, begging you to save yourself.

In a career filled with shocking takes, the zenith of Todd Solondz’s misanthropy may be 2001’s STORYTELLING.

In the film, he posits that real life is where we lie, and fiction is last bastion where we can tell the truth.

My favorite fact about CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND comes from an interview Steven Spielberg gave with James Lipton. When pressed to unpack the meaning of the films expressionist ending, where the mother ship communicates with computer scientists using music, Spielberg finds himself at a loss for words.

Lipton then points out that writer-director Spielberg's Mother was a musician and his Father a computer scientist. He posits that the film was his unconscious attempt to convince the then divorced couple to communicate.

Spielberg gets teary eyed; it had not occurred to him that this is what he may have been trying to say. At any rate, it worked; his parents reunited some years later.

It is hard to believe COME AND SEE was a banned film at one point. Its only crime was telling the truth about the cruelty of war. It's also bleak reminder of the many Russians who sacrificed themselves to fight alongside us in WW2.

As you watch these wartime atrocities play out, you cannot help but wonder how humanity was ever pushed to a point where we could kill each other with such reckless abandon.

The film ends with an answer to this question. Our central character happens upon a picture of Hitler. He stares at the picture with alien-like detachment. He shoots the picture, and with each blast the photograph de-ages till we see Hitler as a child.

The film seems to be saying that the cruelties of WW2 are only understandable once you “come and see” the horror that was inflicted upon its victims. Or, put more simply; that war makes beasts of us all.

The teens at the center of DOGTOOTH live isolated from the outside world. That is, until one of them stumbles upon a trio of VHS tapes; ostensibly JAWS, FLASHDANCE and ROCKY IV.

Although these titles wouldn’t normally be associated with starting a revolution, to the culture-deprived teens at the center of the film, they possess enough power to stir them like nothing else.

In that sense, DOGTOOTH is a love letter to the metamorphic power of movies. It would be hard for any cinephile to watch the film and not find themselves moved. After all, I bet you were a normie until a weird little movie altered the course of your life.

It’s strange how prophetic Peter Greenaway’s THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER turned out to be for its producer/distributor Harvey Weinstein.

I mean, we can start with The Thief, played by Michael Gambon, a brute who bears a striking resemblance to Weinstein in both appearance and behavior as he rules over the patrons of the Le Hollandais Restaurant like a spoiled man-child, instigating fear in those unlucky enough to be in his presence.

Then, there is the fact that both Weinstein and the Thief were married to someone named “Georgina,” that is, before the karmic pendulum swung against the once-celebrated producer.

But perhaps the most prophetic element of the film is its third act, a vision of the looming metoo movement, where the fed-up victims of the Thief gather to enact revenge upon the boorish oaf who once ruled over them.

I wonder if Weinstein knew as he watched the film that he was witnessing a foretelling of his own future? I bet if he were made to watch the film today, he would see the parallels, as the Thief pleads for “Georgina” to take pity on him.

Revenge, like prison food, is usually served cold.

After GONE WITH THE WIND the politically correct crowd will come to sully our memory of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.

They will say the film glorifies a white savoir who appropriates an exotic culture, that it’s a celebration of British colonization, and so on and so on.

I just hope when this inevitably happens some people are around to remind them that from the moment LAWRENCE OF ARABIA premiered in 1962, it was a film about a full-blown lunatic with a god complex.

Last Halloween some friends and I were watching THE SHINING.

During the ballroom sequence, one of my friends shouts out “wait, what’s that on her dress!!!” We rewind a few seconds pause the film and, sure enough, we see a bloody hand print on the back of a woman’s dress.

See it here for yourself: https://tinyurl.com/y6q7wjpt

At first, I was thrilled, I thought; this may be the most scrutinized film of all time, and my eagle-eyed friend spotted something none of us had ever noticed before.

But then a feeling of dread set in, I asked myself, “who’s hand print was that? it looks like it was grabbing at her dress as she walked away.” It planted an image in my head of some terrible incident that happened in a dark corner of the Overlook Hotel.

Stanley Kubrick, this motherfucker was so good at his job that he is still scaring us 20 years after his death.

CANDYMAN has much to say about myth.

It centers on a white semiotics graduate student writing a thesis on Candyman, an African American urban legend. Feeling out of her depth, she finds herself visiting the gang-ridden Cabrini Green to better understand the black experience. There, a frazzled neighbor tells her of one of Candyman’s murders.

Our heroine's own upscale Chicago apartment is a replica of Cabrini Green. The architecture of her existence is a mirror of the hell others less fortunate than her must endure. The only difference is a lack of graffiti-marked walls, and the yuppie price tag.

In a “live a day in someone’s shoes” turn, she finds herself accused of a murder she did not commit, admitted into a psych ward, no one believing her cries of innocence. Talk about better understanding the black experience.

Like her apartment, the films structure is similarly a mirror.

The first half follows our heroine accumulating snapshots that prove the urban legend is real. In the second half, all this proof is ripped away, as Candyman urges her to embrace the essence of what makes something an urban legend, a tale “whispered about at street corners, to frighten children, to make lovers cling closer in their rapture.”

The film ends exactly how it began: a murder overheard in a bathroom, with one witness left behind to tell the tale should some curious student one day probe. The palindromic film itself becomes myth.

And for good measure; “Candyman.”

One of the many joys in George A. Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD is watching it with the knowledge that the entire film was shot at night in a still-active shopping mall.

The indie film crew had to clean up whatever mess they created during the night in time for the mall to open at 8AM every morning. You cannot help but wonder if Romero hid the fact that the film climaxed with a convoy of motorbikes storming the castle.

Beyond bits of movie trivia like this, the film itself is a structural anomaly. By the midsection, the zombie threat has all but been eliminated, and we are left with four characters who have crowned themselves emperors of the local shopping center. Here, in this walled-off fortress, they have unlimited food, clothes, perfume, cutting-edge video games, the world's treasures at their fingertips, all these little trinkets we are told to work for in life.

And yet, with no goal to strive for, they cannot help but shake this pesky feeling that these material things do not bring them any happiness. In fact, it may be the opposite.

Two years ago, I wanted to show BODY DOUBLE to someone, but I wasn’t sure if it was the right choice, I remembered people said the movie was sexist in 1984, and it was 2018 and I wondered if it would hold up to fresh eyes, but I decided to risk it.

I kid you not, I start the movie and about three minutes in, it cuts to an establishing shot, and the main character hops out of his car and walks into the very apartment we were watching the film in.

Talk about a feeling like you are being watched. Anyway, I took it as a sign it was a good movie choice for the night, maybe you will as well.

There is a real-life phenomenon called “mirroring” in the study of twins. This is where identical twins subconsciously manifest the same physical attributes. So, if one twin were to cut their chest, the other will oftentimes “accidentally” cut themselves in the same spot, thus attaining a weird equilibrium.

In DEAD RINGERS, David Cronenberg tells a story of biological determinism through the mirroring process. The twins at the center of the tale are yin to each other’s yang, incapable of being masculine and feminine on their own. As a result, they are doomed to leave the world as they entered it; together.

At times, ZODIAC can seem like more of a data download as opposed to a conventional film.

I prefer to view it as a personal film about resolving childhood trauma. David Fincher was just a kid growing up near San Francisco in 1969 when the Zodiac killer infamously threatened to “wipe out a school bus some morning.”

Rather than cower to the fear of the boogeyman; the notoriously obsessive director took it upon himself to solve the case some 38 years later.

For a movie about the desire to consume human flesh, RAW manages to touch on something even more taboo; that some cravings are absolutely insatiable.

A great film pulls off an emotional heist without the audience knowing they are being played like a fiddle. UNITED 93, by the always great Paul Greengrass, is not concerned with international politics, or the sordid history of what brought these individuals to this precise moment in time on a soon to be fateful day.

It operates on a more primal story engine, simply depicting that when some people are assaulted, when their backs are against the wall, they will fight back with fury and righteous indignation. That’s what makes them American.

THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER is a portrayal of Old Testament moral law.

It shows us how the world deals with injustice, how it twists itself into a pretzel demanding an eye for an eye. No one truly gets away with anything because, in time, everyone will experience their actions from both the perspective of the perpetrator and the victim.

Only then, will you know what someone has been through.

You got to hand it to Pixar, they do not make it easy on themselves, oftentimes choosing themes considered antithetical to what is dramatic.

INSIDE OUT somehow manages to make the intimate feelings of a young girl feel as epic as a journey to Mordor. As a script, it’s fascinating because all the drama is unstated, nothing seemingly happens in the real world, emotions are stifled like a cork about to pop from the pressure of bubbling champagne, that is, until everything comes spilling out in the last ten minutes.

In this release of emotion, the film finds something important to say to anyone tormented by intense thoughts; that the second you express yourself, you will find you are not alone.

SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE stands out for its bonkers ending.

.

Spoilers if you read more...

Our Heroin gathers a group of parents and informs them that she has captured a serial killer who murdered their children. She offers the grief-stricken parents the chance to enact vengeance on this man. The film portrays the revenge as a liberating experience, one that may change your perception of revenge, for the better or for worse.

PAPERHOUSE is about your darkest thoughts manifesting… whether you like it or not.

AWAKENINGS is about a real-life miracle wherein Penny Marshall finds a metaphor for the limited time we have here on earth, and how we should relish in every fleeting moment.

PLAYTIME is like an acid trip it’s so surreal in its aesthetic. The film shows how people are packed like sardines into buses and cars, ushered like cattle into buildings that look suspiciously like industrial-sized paper shredders.

What makes the film an almost spiritual experience is a beating heart centerpiece focusing on a ruckus party that breaks out at a newly renovated restaurant. The party grows so wild and out of control that it feels like a secret rebellion from the oppressive architecture. Humanity having one last “hurrah” before being ritually ground into pulp.

The film conveys something tremendously moving, especially coming from a complete control freak like Jacques Tati: that life is so much better when it’s messy.

In 1964 Sam Fuller made THE NAKED KISS, a film about a hooker with a heart of gold who dismantles an underage sex ring operating out of the suburbs.

What makes HAMILTON so exhilarating and indeed, tragic, is that it celebrates how powerful words spoken with conviction can sculpt the future, while at the same time gently reminding you that those same words can get you killed.

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is about a woman, preyed upon by everyone she meets, bravely telling the devil that her entire purpose in life is to save just one lamb from being led to the slaughter.

THE BIG RED ONE is a movie directed by someone who fought infantry in WW2. Because of this, every scene is a tactical set piece.

Here is a movie that could care less about inserting some pompous commentary on the futility of war, instead it’s concerned with the strategy of how wars are won.

UNDER THE SILVER LAKE presents a vision of Hollywood where, triggered by the disappearance of a prominent millionaire, the elites retreat to underground bunkers, hoping to avoid some impending world event that will affect those unfortunate enough to live on the surface.

I don’t know, it just seems like maybe there's some hidden meaning there, man. But maybe I’m just reading too much into it, you know, whatever, never mind.

BLOW OUT is a movie that understands paranoia. The film teaches you how to use sound and picture convey truth. More importantly, it shows you how you must embed hidden meaning in your art, hoping people will one day follow the trail of breadcrumbs to reveal the true source of the screams.

I cannot shake this feeling that Martin Scorsese’s SILENCE and THE IRISHMAN are connected by the parallels in their endings.

In SILENCE, nothing goes according to plan for the main character. He sacrifices his ambitions to live a life of modesty with a few close friends. Yet, this ending seems bittersweet, we wonder whether he made the right decision even though he is seemingly fulfilled at the film’s conclusion.

Compare that to THE IRISHMAN, where the main character does not sacrifice his ambitions and instead follows through with the plan in painstaking detail. His reward: a shiny ring, his ticket into some exclusive mobster club. The ring does not bring him happiness, nor does it bring his best friend back. We end on the main character wondering why he is suffering, why no one will speak to him.

Can we talk about how THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND has low key muddied film history over the last 40 years? I mean, it was shot in 1970, but not released till 2018, and yet it visually looks strikingly similar to NATURAL BORN KILLERS, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and countless other films made long after it.

What came first, the chicken or the egg? Did overeager cinephiles read so much about the fabled last film by Orson Welles that it creeped into their art? Maybe Peter Bogdanovich had screenings with other creatives who were subconsciously inspired, and cherry picked from the film.

Whatever the case, in a cosmic way, it came out at the perfect time, as if Welles knew it would only see the light of day long after his death. What puts a smile on my face is that this always merry prankster entrusted the editing of his pipe bomb of a last movie to the very generation he was lampooning. You can almost imagine him, with a glint in his eye, saying: “Yeah, but do you have the balls to blow it all up?”

For me, the saddest scene in any film is the moment in A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE where Gena Rowlands says; “Dad... will you stand up for me?” and her Father misinterprets her cries for help and stands up from his seat in place.

HEAD is a musical comedy green lit to cash in on the dwindling success of The Monkees.

Rather than go quietly into the night, the band conspired with Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson to commit career suicide.

Both Paul Schrader and the titular author, Yukio Mishima, in MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS seem to view “the pen is mightier than the sword” as an empty platitude.

They were fascinated with the process of the pen becoming the sword.

Look no further than the final image in BORDER for evidence that you have been successfully indoctrinated to its strange philosophy over its runtime.

It’s an image that would normally be disgusting, but now you see it as nurturing.

This is a film that has something prescient and compassionate to say about coexisting on this planet with people who share more traumatizing histories than us. In one breath, it explains the atrocities of the past while hoping we can build a more peaceful future. Essential viewing, now more than ever.

For better or worse, EYES WIDE SHUT may one day be remembered as Stanley Kubrick's most important movie.

Its admittedly an unlikely candidate to join the lexicon of pop culture, the film nevertheless has become something of a meme. If someone were to joke "is it some kind of Eyes Wide Shut party?" you would know exactly what they mean.

Looking beyond its surface popularity, the film may also be a precision-timed bomb.

With the Jeffery Epstein saga coming to light, it is increasingly more obvious that Kubrick was not only a satirist, but a full-blown class traitor. His intention was to nuke high society New York from the comfort of a set he built in London.

Kubrick never hid his intentions to blow up the world with the movie screen. EYES WIDE SHUT was not as obviously explosive as DR. STRANGELOVE, it was just outrageous enough to be dismissed as the paranoid fantasies of an aging pervert. But make no mistake, the dreamlike story of an elite ruling class that uses people as pawns is going to be top of everyone's mind as we hear how Epstein treated his underage sex slaves as subhuman.

Revolutions historically start when a fed-up middle class feels the elites can harm their children without consequence. After that, it's nothing but pitchforks and guillotines.

If the soft civil war we are in becomes a full-blown class war, we will have Stanley Kubrick in part to thank for the vision he planted in our brains.

SANTA SANGRE is a masterwork that defies categorization. It has a vibrant circus setting and a cast comprised of non-actors, street performers and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s children.

The writer once said the film was inspired by an encounter he had with a mental patient, who nervously explained to him; “I have a voice inside me that tells me to kill you, but don’t worry because I love you.”

SANTA SANGRE brilliantly dramatizes these seemingly disparate emotions.

Audiences watched helplessly as Frank Underwood rose to power in HOUSE OF CARDS. The show turned morality on its head; honesty was weakness, deception was virtue, and the bad guys always win.

Then Kevin Spacey was outed as a sexual predator and his career was toast overnight.

Which begs the question; if you tell a story that goes against the karmic laws of the universe, does the universe deliver the compulsory finale?

Draw your own conclusions.

TAMPOPO bills itself as a simple film about the “art of noodle soup making.”

It’s also a handbook for how to operate a small business, a beginner’s guide to the Kama Sutra, and a philosophy about bringing others joy.

BALL OF FIRE stars a gutter mouthed Barbara Stanwyck and a book smart Gary Cooper. A criminally underrated film that plays like a screwball comedy version of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS.

Prior To JAWS, horror films tried to scare audiences with creepy Victorian mansions at night, or with the shadow of a cat cast along an alley wall.

It's hard to believe they did this knowing full well there was a literal sea-dragon lurking in the ocean that could swallow a man whole.

Has any film been more misunderstood than TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME? Considered a laughingstock upon its release, the film was written off as “weird for weird’s sake.”

The truth is it may have been too nakedly honest for audiences at the time. It’s a #metoo film made before it was fashionable. A movie about the innermost screams of a woman viewed as an object by everyone, even those meant to love and protect her.

The drug-fueled ballad of Laura Palmer’s last days is a bitter pill to swallow, but one worth taking. A reminder that when we look away from uncomfortable art, we are hiding from reality.

It is no mistake that THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT was made by someone who escaped extreme censorship in communist Czechoslovakia. The film celebrates a freedom of speech that only exists in America.

As election season heats up, and people move to censor "wrong think" opinions on the internet, the right to say something you might not like is worth fighting for.

Or, as Larry says late in the film "If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, then it will protect all of you — because I'm the worst!"

A FACE IN THE CROWD (1957) eerily predicted the unsavory union between media and politics.

Released a mere 5 years after Elia Kazan’s testimony ousting communists in Hollywood, the film is a huge middle finger to his critics, and it’s warning about two-faced politicians is still relevant.

BEING THERE (1979) is a magic trick. It’s both profound and simple. Simultaneously cynical and deeply optimistic. It’s all these things depending on who you are when you watch it.

Probably my favorite movie of all time.

HI, MOM! is Brian DePalma’s best film.

It starts out as a modest instruction manual on how use consumer cameras to create independent cinema and evolves into a ‘how to’ guide on overthrowing the government.

If you are looking for a sure-to-make-you-feel good film during this pandemic, check out SHERMAN’S MARCH.

It’s about a filmmaker who becomes woefully distracted from the titular subject of his own documentary and instead decides to get married. It’s a sweet, old-fashioned story about the search for love.

Lindsay Anderson's O LUCKY MAN! (1973) is a gem. Under normal circumstances, I would hesitate to recommend a three-hour long movie, but it is perfect viewing for lock-down.

It has a jaunty tone that will make you feel great, Helen Mirren shows up playing multiple characters, and it is peppered with folksy music. Seriously, this may be in my top five favorite movies of all time. There is nothing quite like it. Guaranteed to put a smile on your face.

STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME is a big budget “hangout” movie. A fish out of water story where the crew of the USS Enterprise runs circles around the inhabitants of San Francisco in 1986 on their journey to Save the Whales, and consequently save the world.

It's like a mashup of RIO BRAVO and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY you didn’t know you needed.

Most David Cronenberg movies end with the main character wanting to die.

CRASH is special because it starts that way.