The final fifteen minutes are some of the most grueling ever put to screen.

A conspiracy thriller as euphorically entertaining as it is devastatingly bleak.

Scum lives up to its title to this day, its manic energy balanced with an assured and naked openness that creates a searing level of realism and, as such, savagery.

The masterful ten-minute gallery set piece, for instance, is first positioned as a scene of meditation as she absentmindedly gazes around the room, looking back and forth between the paintings in the room and the people around her until Pino Donaggio’s serenely swirling score ebbs and flows with her own rising passions.

Brian De Palma‘s shocking exploitation gut-punch, Sisters, is a perfectly orchestrated exercise in style, a staging of some of the finest suspense sequences since Alfred Hitchcock was above ground.

Ozu spins a social and emotional tapestry from a 1950s Tokyo suburb in which two young brothers, desperate for their own TV set, take a vow of silence in protest against the frivolous speech of adult society.

While Private Property, with its tawdry edges and jarring, out-of-synch ADR, lacks the studio polish of its influences, it puts a wonderfully dirty spin on their voyeuristic style.

Documenting the socializing of gang members, Check It is a fascinating and comprehensive ethnographic portrait of inner-city youth that may inspire conversation and action without offering easy answers or artificial sentiments.

As a thinkpiece generator, it is absolutely spectacular – by every other metric, it’s a failure.

This doc may actually benefit more from a viewing outside any contemporary hype vortex.

Admirably choosing empathy for its non-actor, real-life factory worker subjects over the ironies of cinematic representation for the majority of its lengthy runtime, The Nothing Factory still doesn’t seem to offer any real astute observations at the end of the day.

It is vital to bring stories like this to wider attention, but it cannot be said for certain whether the movie does so at the cost of furthering Marish’s suffering and thus also exploiting her.

This grueling, pulsating, in-your-face film–almost to a fault–has ferocious power, but it’s going to divide like a fissure.