“My response to viewers who are puzzled by the plots is, I don’t think you’re so puzzled as you may think. We all have a certain amount of intuition, and that is something that can be trusted and should be trusted… And so when you see something that’s abstract in a film, and you seem [...]
DIRECTED BY: Jim Jarmusch
FEATURING: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Robert Mitchum, Crispin Glover, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, Mili Avatal, Gabriel Byrne
PLOT: Mild-mannered accountant Bill Blake heads west, becomes a wanted man after he
shoots a man in self defense, and, wounded, flees to the wilderness where he’s befriended by an [...]
“Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.”–George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
DIRECTED BY: Richard Linklater
FEATURING: Wiley Wiggins, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delphy
PLOT: An unnamed young man appears to be drifting from dream to dream, each animated in a different style. His dreams involve him talking to various college [...]
DIRECTED BY: Jeremy Alter
FEATURING: Anton Pardoe, Roselyn Sanchez, Patrick Bauchau
PLOT: In a dark, nameless city, a man must return to a city in which he is despised to
save the life of “the one who got away.” He must travel to the rotten heart of this noirish nightscape to get her back, putting his life at [...]
DIRECTED BY: William Forsyth
FEATURING: Christine Lahti, Sara Walker, Andrea Burchill
PLOT: Two orphaned girls are joined by their transient aunt who becomes their
unconventional guardian in this dreamy, pensive study of nonconformity and the breaking of social mores in a restrictive 1950’s environment.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While Housekeeping has an original plot about [...]
“I only include things that are psychologically true in my stories, no matter how bizarre, stupid, silly or gratuitous the episodes in them may seem… I can only hope that the spectacle of me trying to inflict pain on hard-to-reach places on my own body is amusing to some people.”–Guy Maddin
DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin
FEATURING: Darcy [...]
AKA The Legend of Doom House; Malpertuis: The Legend of Doom House
“For sure, one of the weirdest films you’ll ever see, a cult film above and beyond anything else; a film for those initiated into midnight screenings. Where else do such dreams take place?”—Ernest Mathjis, DVD liner notes for the Barrel Entertainment edition of Malpertuis
DIRECTED BY: Harry [...]
“Only appearing in your dream. Distorting every sound to create a world like to other. This is what they live for; jumping from one person’s dream to another. Once you have been chosen, you will lose all control of your dreams.”–from the script of Funky Forest: the First Contact
DIRECTED BY: Katsuhito Ishii, Hajime Isimin (AKA [...]
“I think the movie is fun. It has a lot of serious emotional stuff in it, but it’s funny in a weird way. You don’t have to worry, ‘What does the burning house mean?’ Who cares. It’s a burning house that someone lives in—it’s funny.”–Director/writer Charlie Kaufman
DIRECTED BY: Charlie Kaufman
FEATURING: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, [...]
“I wanted the film to be about the fatal attachment of Russians to their national roots, an attachment which they will carry with them for their entire lives, regardless of where destiny may fling them. How could I have imagined as I was making Nostalghia that the stifling sense of longing that fills the screen [...]
