Ed Gonzalez

With its view of Vietnam as a colonial mud pit being raped by a post-rock generation, it’s as aimless as it is prescient. Coppola’s subjective use of technology (pathologically integrating operatic image and sound) evokes war as a psychedelic fugue state: timeless, horrifying, and affecting us all.

I Am Cuba is a cinephile’s wet dream, a collage of Herculean feats of technical wizardry that would be easy to dismiss if it wasn’t so humane.

Mulholland Drive is a haunting, selfish masterpiece that literalizes the theory of surrealism as perpetual dream state.

Ghost World is a beautiful evocation of the ghostly nature of love, loss, and ultimately memory itself.

In the Mood For Love is ravishing beyond mortal words.

The film isn’t only revolutionary for its aesthetic rigorousness but its rare fascination with white America’s difficulty relating to people of color.

Argento’s deliriously artificial horror film owes as much to Georges Méliès and German Expressionism (specifically The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) as it does to Jean Cocteau and Grimm fairy tales. =

A screwball surrealist comedy that asks us to laugh at an unconventional romance while also disarming us with the realization that its fantasy scenario isn't too far from our present reality.

A torrid journey through the subconscious of a little girl lost, Fire Walk with Me is also a cautionary tale of sorts, the sad chronicle of a sleepy town trying to rid itself of its dirty laundry.

Blowup daringly suggests that an image without politics isn’t an image at all.

Allen bravely posits one’s fear of change and the comfort in finiteness. In the end, Husbands and Wives becomes a mirror of false illusions, relentlessly held up by Allen before the faces of anyone who has ever looked for a reason to leave only to sheepishly stay behind.

Opera is a violent aria of memory, bad luck, the artistic drive and the horror of the stare.

Throughout, what truly matters to director Jonathan Glazer is articulating through visual and aural enticement the unconscious power of our death drive.

Perverse yet remarkably life-affirming, Night of the Hunter may be the best film ever made about spiritual perseverance.

Widely regarded as Ousmane Sembène’s finest achievement, Xala is a cutting morality tale that equally blames the corruption of Senegal’s sociopolitical environment on Euro-centricity and African auto-destruction.

Though set in Mexico and ripe with authentic details from daily life, Él is less a portrait of machismo gone awry than it is a brutal and absurd glimpse at one man’s runaway paranoia.

There’s a moral “quality” to the bloodshed that you won’t find in your average Hollywood action film.

Miyazaki celebrates individualism and nature’s simple, untainted beauties, subsequently pondering the transcendent power of communication between the “inside” and the “outside.”

The film’s brilliance emanates equally from its structure (the story is delicately bookended by two cultural rituals: a wedding and a funeral), the acuteness of its gaze, and Yang’s acknowledgement of life as a series of alternately humdrum and catastrophic occurrences, like a flower that blooms in the summer and wilts in the fall; he hopes you will notice it, because seeing is what validates its unique extraordinariness.

Deep Red is a riveting thriller whose secrets carefully unravel via a series of carefully calibrated compositions that become not unlike virtual gateways into Freudian pasts.

Polanski brilliantly evokes an evil society’s almost supernatural ability to recognize weakness in others and to punish all that is good.

Many of the film’s pleasures, then, derive from watching these characters successfully use the tools of the stage (improvisation, sense memory, prosthetics) to successfully subvert the Nazis.

It figures that the sex scene from Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now has become more legendary than the film itself. Forget that Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland were off-screen lovers at the time, the film’s infamous bedroom romp is every bit as devastating and organic as anything else in the film.

Call it what you will (documentary, mockumentary, self-fulfilling prophecy), Close-Up is still the definitive film-on-film commentary.

Tenebre is a riveting defense of auteur theory, ripe with self-reflexive discourse and various moral conflicts. It’s both a riveting horror film and an architect’s worst nightmare.

It could be the most authentic representation of wilderness life ever put on screen.

The Lost City of Z links every weathered look that Percy Fawcett throws to the heart of his spiritual yearning.

Bitter Tears offers a sensory feast that’s expanded on by the elaborate dialogue, which is poetic even as translated into English, and by the astonishingly sensual and fluid movements of the actors and the camera.