Films We've Screened

It will always be a miscarriage of cinematic justice that Jodorowsky didn’t get to make his version of Frank Herbert’s Dune but we will always be consoled by The Holy Mountain. In typical Jodorowsky fashion this film is beautiful, bizarre, and humbling in the filmmaker’s singular vision. Inspired by obscure literary works spanning several centuries, and produced with the help of psylocibin, LSD, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, it tells the story of an alchemist leading a band of seekers on a quest for enlightenment.

Něco z Alenky, or Alice, was Jan Švankmajer’s answer to Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. Adapted from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it follows the epnoymous Alice as she chases and is chased by the White Rabbit. Featuring exceptionally terrifying stop motion animation, it is short on dialogue and rich in visual appeal.

The most venomous and somehow articulate political satire of the 20th century, co-written and directed by the film’s star Warren Beatty, follows California Senator Jay Bulworth as he runs for re-election in his home state. Facing a crisis of conscience, having sacrificed his ideals in the face of the crushing political machine of national politics, he arranges for his own political assassination. Finally free of petty politics, he speaks truth to power by endlessly rapping.

Christian is a very handsome and independently wealthy loner who meets Sigrid on a dating app. Their burgeoning romance is unblemished until Sigrid learns that Christian has a dog. Not just any kind of dog, but a man wearing a dog suit who never takes it off. Sigrid throws caution to the wind till she begins to suspect that there may be more to this than a simple kink.

It’s an experimental horror film from Canada which follows two children who wake to find that their parents have disappeared and all the doors and windows in their home are gone. The word experimental should be italicized, bolded, underlined, and in all caps in any description of this film: it’s an hour and forty minutes, and you’ll feel every second of it, as the film pans from ceiling to wall to TV screen to Lego set back to ceiling and wall.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s first film in color, and he uses it like nobody had before — turning the industrial landscape around Ravenna into a study of a mind coming apart.

Ken Russell’s entry into the genre of whacky, off-the-wall, manic film, it is an idealized version of the life of Franz Liszt starring The Who’s Roger Daltrey. Between musical numbers, more and more bizarre and cryptic portrayals of the life of Liszt spool out the story of his fame and fortune.

The second TV episode that the Film Series has screened is Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog, a Polish miniseries composed of ten one-hour short films inspired by the Ten Commandments. The first follows Krzysztof and his son Paweł, a precocious boy who programs his computer to control the doors and windows of their apartment. Paweł asks his father existential questions about life and death, who answers objectively, but Paweł seeks deeper meaning in life. It isn’t a beautiful film per se, but it is excellent.

It’s Oedipus Rex and A Clockwork Orange all in one — this Japanese New Wave film, part drama and part documentary, follows Eddie in the gay underground of late-’60s Tokyo. Eddie confronts her past as well as navigates a tortured love affair with her rival Lida, along with occasional trips to the shops with her pals. It is ponderous, stylized, thrilling, and stunning.

Do you like steak? Do you enjoy machismo? Do you like Jimmy Stewart? Then this is the movie for you. Directed by American cinema royalty John Ford, and featuring the manly Lee Marvin and the Duke, it follows a young idealistic lawyer moving out west to bring order and the social contract to a town grappling with the impending statehood of their territory and the ranch barons who resist it.

Another Italian director, but a film with a lot less revelry, Marx Can Wait chronicles Marco Bellocchio as he recalls the suicide of his twin brother, Camillo. It is a very vivid investigation of memory and family dysfunction as Bellocchio interviews different family members, recalling their childhood, their mentally ill older brother, the war, and the events that immediately led up to Camillo’s death.

A group of slackers in post-war Italy grope for anything of substance in their small-town life: Alberto sings, Leopoldo writes, Fausto chases all the women, and Moraldo longs for something much more. It is a slice of life and a lot of revelry, written and directed by Federico Fellini.

Very tame by the tastes of cinema-goers today, Peeping Tom incited a great deal of controversy at its release in 1960, so much that it permanently damaged the career of its director, Michael Powell. Reviewers objected to the film’s depiction of a very troubled young photographer who murders women and captures their final moments on film, as well as his own tortured relationship to the past.

Written, directed, and produced by Shane Carruth, of 401 favorite Primer, the film explores human intimacy, memory, and little piggies in what is a very beautiful, but ultimately aimless and self-indulgent, movie about film students, by a film student.

If you saw a movie made in the second half of the 20th century, you have probably seen Harry Dean Stanton, a quintessential character actor. Lucky is his last film, made at the age of 90; it follows the eponymous character as he leads an independent but aged life, interacting with his youthful townie friends and their own experiences with loss, death, and fear.

Called the most disturbing film ever made, and it lives up to its reputation with nearly every frame. Pier Paolo Pasolini adapted the unfinished 18th-century novel The 120 Days of Sodom, changing the setting from the French countryside to the northern Italian region of Lombardy and the town of Salò. Set at the end of the Second World War, the film depicts the terrible abuse of nine boys and nine girls, locked up in a palatial villa by four fascists. Salò is challenging but rewarding, and a cinephile is defined by whether or not they have actually seen it.

Darren Aronofsky’s first film, it follows Max Cohen, a number theorist who is committed to discovering the mathematical order that underlies reality. This commitment leads to greater and greater alienation as he is confronted by the un-orderliness of human behavior and the cryptic printouts from his computer, Euclid.

Based on the real-life murder of a child by the notorious Leopold and Loeb, students at the University of Chicago, this film was adapted from the stage for the silver screen. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the film depicts a single evening in a single continuous shot after two young men, convinced of their moral and intellectual superiority, murder a friend and hide his body in plain sight. They then host a dinner party in which their old prep school mentor, Rupert (Jimmy Stewart), becomes the guest of honor.

This counter-culture entry by Hal Ashby features Jack Nicholson as First Class Billy “Badass” Buddusky, a US Navy sailor tasked with escorting a troubled young comrade (Randy Quaid). Vacillating between sympathy and cruelty, Buddusky and his pals romp the northeast before a final, meaningful confrontation with the limits of human freedom.

Based on William Burroughs’ famous novel of the same name and starring Peter Weller as Bill Lee (Burroughs’ pseudonym), an insect exterminator who gets high on his own supply. It is difficult to give an informative description of as disorienting and worthwhile a film as this. There are alien milk machines, insect typewriters, and plenty of body horror.

A man decides to become a contract killer and takes a job in LA that mainly involves going to the beach and finding Rubenesque women for a pal.

Controversial when it was released, If… has only grown more divisive with time. In Malcolm McDowell’s first film, he plays Mick Travis, a misanthropic young man at a private school in England. Abused by the older boys and completely alienated from the teachers, Mick and his friends seek to defy the grinding social relationships the school requires. McDowell’s performance caught the attention of Stanley Kubrick, who decided to cast him in the 1971 classic A Clockwork Orange.

A classic blaxploitation horror film which follows an anthropologist transformed into a vampire.

One reviewer put it thusly: “I was deeply uncomfortable with this film. It really is just 90 minutes of hipsters being cruel and mean. I loved it.” Besides being another bizarre film by one half of The Awesome Show crew (On Cinema’s Tim Heidecker), it is also one of the most accurate and visceral depictions of New York in summertime made to date.

Michael Mann’s feature film debut stars James Caan as an expert thief and safe cracker who wants to go legit, but only after one last score. A soundtrack by Tangerine Dream accompanies a rain-soaked and ominous Chicago classic.

Technically not a film, this entry in the 401 Film Series is the series finale of the comedy series Nathan For You. Nathan Fielder aids the efforts of Bill Heath to find a long lost love and to become a Ding-Dong-Daddy from Dumas.

A documentary about the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, it details the efforts of activists in the city up to and including the violence of the convention.

This film is something of a documentary with no words. From the Hopi language Koyaanisqatsi means “life out of balance,” and the film consists of a number of different moving images jostling between nature and technology, pastoralism and modernism. A 90-minute tone poem, it builds tension through the at times dissonant, and other times consonant, images and score. It is a singular film that has a singular soundtrack by post-modernist composer Philip Glass. A masterpiece.

Very likely the least happy movie ever made, it is really quite an impressive depiction of human misery. Todd Solondz directs the likes of Philip Seymour Hoffman in a film composed of parallel stories of dread and suffering.

Forty years after the original Cat People (1942) shocked audiences with its riveting tale of a woman who was a cat, Cat People returned with Malcolm McDowell to finally give us our long awaited creature feature about horny kitty cats. An excellent soundtrack by Giorgio Moroder (with a title song by David Bowie) accompanies a steamy tale of intrigue and kitty cats.

A cursed woman, a ship architect, and a cute kitty cat — a timeless tale of romance and Romani curses.

The greatest sci-fi film ever made for less than $10,000, Primer endures as technically, philosophically, and cinematically complex and sophisticated, and rewards many, many viewings. Two software engineers develop time traveling technology, and then deal with the implications.

The film John Boorman made after not being able to make The Lord of the Rings, and the film Sean Connery did to prove to the world that he was not just Bond, Zardoz follows the gunslinger Zed as he discovers the banality of immortality and that “the Gun is Good. The Penis is Bad”.

For a time, the only place you could find the trailers for this film were on Pornhub. It is a Cronenberg film made in Mexico by way of outer space. It follows a few characters as they discover new depths of pleasure and pain having intercourse with an alien creature.

The most interesting film about concrete ever made, this understated and dreamy film stars Tom Hardy, who performs against no one for 90 minutes in a surprisingly compelling movie about a man who drops everything in his life to be at the birth of his illegitimate child.

Called “the most dangerous film ever made”, it took 11 years to make and more than 70 members of the cast and crew were injured during production by their feline co-stars. Part horror film and part comedy of errors Roar follows Hank, a naturalist living in Tanzania with dozens of Big Cats to study their behavior. When his family comes to visit, they are all threatened by the terrible influence of Togar, a male African lion, on his fellow big cats. Quite possibly the greatest movie ever made.