In this hear-exploding tale of a cinematic dream, Mark Borchardt leads a team of hometown thespians and semi-willing family members through two years of financial crisis and emotional turmoil on a mission to finance is magnum opus, Northwestern through a direct-to-market, no-budget horror short titled Coven. The result is a bizarrely touching and hilariously poignant documentary that became an underground classic and a uniquely arresting portrait of Midwestern eccentricity, determination and character.

Ruben Östlund explores uneasy social dynamics through five darkly humorous, profoundly unsettling vignettes in his multi-chapter sophomore feature, which he has called “a tragic comedy or a comic tragedy.” From a party host too proud to treat a nasty fireworks injury to a teacher placed in the middle of an uncomfortable situation when she observes a colleague mistreating a student, Involuntary is a fearless expression of Östlund’s interest in issues of public morality, codes of masculinity, and the tension between the individual and the group.

In 1924, neophyte filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack—later to achieve cinematic immortality as the makers of KING KONG—joined forces with journalist and spy Marguerite Harrison and set off to film an adventure. They found excitement, danger, and drama in the migration of the Bakhtiari nomads of Persia. Twice a year, more than fifty thousand people and half a million animals surmounted seemingly impossible obstacles—braving the icy, raging waters of the half-mile-wide Karun River and winding their way up the side of the sheer, snow-covered rock face of the fifteen-thousand-foot-high Zardeh Kuh mountain—to take their herds to pasture. Risking their own lives in the process, Cooper and Schoedsack captured astonishing, unforgettable images of courage and determination and created one of the cinema’s first great documentaries.

The struggle between the strictures of religion and humankind’s brute animal nature plays out amid the beautifully forbidding landscapes of remote Iceland in this stunning psychological epic from director Hlynur Pálmason. In the late nineteenth century, Danish priest Lucas makes the perilous trek to Iceland’s southeastern coast with the intention of establishing a church. There, the arrogant man of God finds his resolve tested as he confronts the harsh terrain, temptations of the flesh, and the reality of being an intruder in an unforgiving land. What unfolds is a transfixing journey into the heart of colonial darkness—one that’s attuned to both the majesty and the terrifying power of the natural world.

This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath tells the story of a small group of students from an all-female college who vanish on a St. Valentine’s Day outing. Less a mystery than a journey into the mystic as well as an inquiry into issues of class and sexual repression in Australian society, Peter Weir’s gorgeous, disquieting film is a work of poetic horror whose secrets haunt viewers to this day.

At his secluded chateau in the French countryside, a brilliant, obsessive doctor attempts a radical plastic surgery to restore the beauty of his daughter’s disfigured countenance, at a horrifying price. The film remains legendary for both subverting and enriching the horror genre with its singular brand of terror, of gore, of inexplicable beauty. Eyes Without a Face weaves the ghastly and the lyrical, finding images that once seen are never forgotten. HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Perhaps the single most electric experience of the last decade in cinema, Gaspard Noe’s Climax churns through a dance party that gets way, way out of hand when the sangria gets spiked with an unnamed hallucinogen. Packed with delirious, dizzying dance sequences, all the more aggressive and liberated by the sexual fluidity of the dancers themselves; the film is a possessed, drunk and drugged out, mainline trip of Boschian decadence and derangement, and a spiral into blissful, hellish euphoria.

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