The Best Challenging Movies to Watch (+Released: 1988)

Murdering your spouse is bad, so it’s slightly bizarre how Drowning by Numbers has an unbothered, even amused, attitude towards its murders. Moments seem randomly placed, like the first scene of a girl jumping rope while listing the stars by name, and the film can be hard to follow, even if the production design and […]

As a woman, it’s risky enough to trust a male gynecologist, but to have him seduce, manipulate, and experiment on you? That’s a horror all on its own, but Dead Ringers operates on several levels beyond the political. It’s also psychological and sexual, and because this is a Cronenberg film, it’s done with an unsettling […]

Loosely inspired by her childhood in French Africa, Claire Denis’ directorial debut Chocolat fittingly depicts this past through the perspective of a young child named France. She captures that viewpoint through a series of memories, through warm and beautifully shot moments in summer, but many of these instances take on a subtle dimension. For a […]

Based on the true story of the last French woman executed by guillotine, Story of Women depicts wartime survival under the Vichy regime. While men were sent to fight in the war, women in France stayed home, in a country occupied by the Nazis, with their government collaborating with the Axis powers they were supposedly […]

While Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is widely considered a classic, there’s just something inscrutable, mysterious, and even a bit weird about the tale. Czech director Jan Svankmajer’s version takes a distinctly unsettling approach, with everything but normal-sized Alice animated into creepy stop-motion, including, but not limited to, cards, puppets falling apart, and actual dead […]