A creepy, crawling, and slimy world of night visions, body horror, and psychosis, Eraserhead was the first feature-length film of the American surrealist David Lynch. It is dreamlike, immersive, and lucid even as it remains illogical and murky, willing to dive into its own darkness with pleased, decadent abandon. Like…
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Dogtooth (2009)
Unraveling as a disturbed allegory eluding explanation, a satire of the unstated, a madcap domestic fantasy, Dogtooth is a provocative and peculiar film that pokes fun at the family as a modern, exclusive, deviant microcosm following its own rules and strictures. This modern Greek family, residing in a desolate exurbia…
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Johnny Guitar (1954)
Johnny Guitar is a sham Western, a risible and garish melodrama, and a guise for the boiling, salacious sexual tendencies of its characters, who are not what they appear to be. It is the last of these, as the meatiness and sweat hidden by the unserious platitudes of the genre,…
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Night and Fog (1956)
“Who among us keeps watch over this strange watchtower to warn the arrival of our new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own?” In the placid, breezy fields of the abandoned camps that once housed millions of those soon to be dispatched to the crematoria, the filmmaker Alain…
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L.A. Confidential (1997)
Thinking of the staid, halcyon clichés of the American 1950s, I could not help contrasting them with the underbelly of corruption obtaining in the same decade, when illicit activity and human lustfulness were as they have always been, but with more mendacity and concealment papered over by a culture touting…
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Amélie (2001)
An eccentric project of a little-known director with a Hollywood credit to his name, Amélie is all lightness and whimsy and enjoys basking in its own playfulness. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who had long wanted to make the film, made sure the balance between its self-mockery and playfulness were just right, so…
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Ego and the Will to Power
“I had no father, I am like no father; / I have no brother, I am like no brother; / And this word ‘love,’ which graybeards call divine, / Be resident in men like one another / And not in me—I am myself alone.” –Richard, Duke of Gloucester The Duke…
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Despair and Nothingness
One of the common but unspoken phenomena to which humans everywhere are susceptible—especially those that have bottomed out after finding that life has very few stable guideposts for the individual—is that of existential despair, which takes as many forms as there are individuals. But while the forms are many, the…
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Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
This lushly inventive and moving fable, set in Francoist Spain during World War II, tries to pull off the combining of fantasy and harsh, relentless wartime reality, and the result is entirely that of its director, Guillermo del Toro, whose international career has been pockmarked with stories of monsters and…
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The Lesson of Lucien
I Years before the onslaught of a madness that was to incapacitate him, voiding his intellect like the snapping of a high wire of isolation and brilliance, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a book by the name of The Gay Science featuring the parable of the madman leaping into the marketplace, bearing…
