Of The Best Mind- Bending Movies. The 2. 01. 3 Sundance Film Festival will likely go down in history as one of its finer years, with a nearly unparalleled programming slate of movies that got festival goers excited not just about the festival, but cinema in general. And perched at the top of the list of the festival’s best movies (one of the ones that got people excited about cinema as a whole) is easily Shane Carruth‘s lyrical mind- puzzler “Upstream Color” (review here). A film about inceptions, no wait, pig farmers, orchid thieves and dysfunctional relationships, or is it about the nature of love via the nature of all things? The interconnectedness of our daily lives? Walden?”. Carruth’s psychotropic, opaque picture is dense and dream- like, culminating in a masterful final act of only images and music and nary a word of dialogue. It’s a fascinating picture that has left some scratching their heads, but invited others to soak in repeat viewings, desperate to crack its hard- to- decipher code.

These pages contain a collection of concise reviews for movies and film-makers that are extreme in various ways. This is an encyclopedia (up to 2016) of fringe. R.I.P. Alain Resnais (1922-2014): Watch Essential Films 'Night And Fog,' 'Mon Oncle d'Amerique' & More In Full. The Castro Theatre is San Francisco's Historic Movie Palace. Hotel California by Eagles song meaning, lyric interpretation, video and chart position.

Are you a movie buff? Read our classic movies list, including 'The Godfather,' 'Casablanca,' 'Vertigo,' 'The Music Box' and 17 more. Directed by Alain Resnais. With Michel Bouquet, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler. The history of Nazi Germany's death camps of the Final Solution and. “Inland Empire” (2006) Overflowing with the thematic preoccupations that seem to have haunted David Lynch for the last half of his career in films like. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (French: Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) is a 1964 French-German romantic musical film directed by Jacques Demy, starring Catherine Deneuve. L'Année dernière à Marienbad (released in the US as Last Year at Marienbad and in the UK as Last Year in Marienbad) is a 1961 French-Italian film directed by Alain. Back to www.qedcat.com. MMDB−The Mathematical Movie Database. by Burkard Polster and Marty Ross. Last updated: 28 June, 2017. (Recent additions will be marked with.

And what’s more — it got us thinking about movies that left us similarly (invigoratingly) perplexed. These are movies that don’t just make you think, they change the way you think; movies that hit you on a visceral and intellectual level. They bruise your brain.

It’s with this in mind (and these are nothing if not movies that you think about endlessly) that we compiled our list of 1. They might turn your mind into a soft pretzel they sell at the mall, but you’ll be all the better for it. Upstream Color” is being released in theater tomorrow, so check it out and give us your thoughts on what made (or should have made) our mind- bending movies list.“Inland Empire” (2. Overflowing with the thematic preoccupations that seem to have haunted David Lynch for the last half of his career in films like “Mulholland Drive,” “Lost Highway” and even ” Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me,” the director’s 2. Nearly 3 hours long and his first film not shot on celluloid (lensed on standard definition digital video instead), David Lynch‘s “Inland Empire” might not be, to some, the masterpiece that is “Mulholland Drive,” it is nevertheless still quintessentially weird, disturbing and genuinely unnerving — perhaps the closest Lynch has come to psychological horror since “Eraserhead.” Within the bewildering picture, a film crew is making a movie that they realize after the fact is a type of remake — a movie abandoned during production because the lead actress was murdered midway through filming (the rumor is that the movie is cursed).

Laura Dern plays the lead actress in this unnamed film alongside Justin Theroux, a lothario actor known for bedding his co- stars, who has to deal with her extremely jealous and distrustful Eastern European husband. Watch Nanny Mcphee And The Big Bang Megavideo more. As the script she’s shooting becomes blurred with her reality, Dern’s character(s) becomes increasingly sucked into the picture’s surreal, feverish and authentically nightmarish- tone.

Featuring Lynch regulars like Grace Zabriskie, Diane Ladd, Harry Dean Stanton and co- starring Julia Ormond and Jeremy Irons (with cameos by Mary Steenburgen, Terry Crews, William H. Macy and more), “Inland Empire” is also known for its absurdist elements, like a recurring sitcom- y sequence with human- like rabbits replete with laugh track and all — taken straight from the filmmaker’s web- only video series, “Rabbits” — but Lynch’s picture is strangely coherent and one of his most chilling works. Inland Empire” was shot without a script and took Lynch two and a half years to make. The filmmaker hasn’t directed a feature since, but ‘Inland’ is a masterful and frightening brainful that one can ruminate on (and revisit) over and over again.“Celine and Julie” (1. The most elliptically playful and joyfully absurd mindbender on this list, though itself not without its nightmarish qualities, Jacques Rivette‘s whimsical and strange “Celine & Julie” is the ‘pop goes the weasel’ meets Alice In Wonderland of brainbusters, albeit a long and winding one, with many contours and colors that runs for an exhausting three and a half hours.

Centering on two female friends (Dominique Labourier and Juliet Berto) who find themselves in a loop they cannot free themselves from, “Celine and Julie” is equal parts buddy travelogue, mystery and creepy ghost tale, which culminates in a haunted mansion with the two Scooby Doo- like detectives who try to help a dead girl discover who killed her. But it’s far less linear than it sounds, more of an opaque cycle of loosely connected themes that coalesce suddenly in the final act like a magic trick pulled off while in a state of hypnosis. Lots of films go down the rabbit hole, but many tend to take themselves too seriously and often don’t have as much fun. Delirious, creepy and comical, there’s nothing like “Celine And Julie” out there and it’s unlikely this deeply idiosyncratic work will ever be quite matched in its sprawl, ambition and sense of humor.“Pi” (1. Everyone’s gotta start somewhere. And before more polished works like “Requiem For A Dream,” and “The Fountain,” Darren Aronofsky made the low- budget, 1. Pi.” Blending high- end mathematics, Jewish Kabbalah mysticism and numerology, “Pi” is a scrappy, high- energy look at obsessions and conspiracy theories revolving on the elusive and infinite number of Pi — 3.

Mount Everest of numbers for mathematicians who have tried and failed to round the number off. The picture, scored to kinetic breakbeats and ’9. Aphex Twin, Orbital, Autechre and more, follows Max (Sean Gullette) a recluse mathematician trying to break Wall Street’s “code” with his until- then unsuccessful formulas, who is being hounded by a mysterious company who wants him to come work for them. Meanwhile, he meets a number- obsessed Hassid (Ben Shenkman) who ropes him into a new numeric challenge, but is warned by his retired professor (Mark Margolis), that chasing a solution for Pi is a fool’s errand. Max, however, is convinced his teacher fell to a stroke because the exhausting probabilities broke him and in order to discover the deeper mysteries of the number, one has to dance past the edge of madness. Reality bends (as it is wont to do in these movies) and Max finds himself at the nexus of a conspiracy where all parties want the knowledge in his head that’s driving him insane.

Pi” is to Aronofsky what “Primer” is to Carruth, and while to compare them does a disservice to both, “Pi” is ultimately still the more successful low- budget debut, if only because it burrows in the head more profoundly in the end.“Last Year at Marienbad” (1. Alain Resnais’ seminal and enigmatic 1.

Last Year at Marienbad” is one of the early proto touchstones in the “mind- bending” genre (if we wanna call it that, though for these purposes we will) and while chilly and aloof for many, it’s also tremendously melancholy and haunting; at its core a stylishly lavish and mysterious look at our eternal and existential loneliness. Perhaps a collection of choreographed moments that exist outside of time, Resnais’ picture centers on a social gathering in an elegant chateau wherein one of the guests, a nameless man (Giorgio Albertazzi) meets a nameless woman (Delphine Seyrig) and insists they have met before and she has been waiting for him all along.

She knows nothing of this (or is it a game?) and another man (Sacha Pitoëff) might be her husband. Like an eerie and slow- motion game of mathematical nim, the characters in this story slowly pirouette around one another in an emotional and provocatively opaque game of memory, love and longing. Baffling, dream- like, disorienting and ambiguous, with its flashbacks and sequences and conversations that repeat over and over again like in maddening loop, “Last Year at Marienbad” is usually viewed as either impenetrable nonsense (the nee plus ultra of icy, glacially paced foreign films Americans liked to mock in the ‘7.