 Not many movies can claim to be a beloved landmark in our pop-culture consciousness as well as a personal favorite of such iconoclasts as Salman Rushdie and David Lynch. Such is the paradoxical nature of The Wizard of Oz, which is both a masterpiece of lavish, big-budget entertainment and a nightmarish journey into the uncanny—a shining example of how movies make our deepest childhood dreams and terrors come true. I remember first seeing The Wizard of Oz at five or six years old and being unable to sleep for days because of the Wicked Witch and her Flying Monkeys; even now, when the green-hued witch appears in a red fireball to destroy the peace of Munchkinland, or when her devilish monkeys flit across the ground and abscond with Dorothy into the sky, I shudder at such a primal image of innocence besieged by monstrous evil.
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 If nothing else, Hard to Be a God will almost certainly lay claim to the title of 2015’s most disgusting cinematic experience. The world we see during the film’s three hours is grimy, shitstained, festering and noisome (we can almost smell the screen); the sets are typically smeared with a combination of mud and something less pleasant, and the soundtrack is a near-constant parade of belches, squeals, and tormented yells marked by uneasy silence. The camera inches through claustrophobic spaces, an array of obstructions (various meats, dead animals) hanging from the ceiling. Then, of course, there are the disembowelments and beheadings. This might not be the most alluring sales pitch, but thankfully Hard to Be a God can be regarded as much more than just a vile horror show, a miserable wallow in human awfulness; there is existential mystery and aesthetic wonder beside the repugnance.
 It’s tempting to begin with a valid concern about reviewing Citizen Kane: what more can be said? Constant contender for Best Film of All Time polls, fabled story of a Hollywood boy wonder rewriting the cinematic rules on his first attempt, thinly veiled biopic of news magnate William Randolph Hearst (who tried to destroy every print of the film after its release), a macabre allegory for the heights and horrors of American capitalism—it’s no exaggeration to claim that Citizen Kane is the most analyzed movie of all time. Because of this, most people—even some who have seen Orson Welles’ film several times—assume that Citizen Kane is a dry, dusty classic, studied beyond exhaustion, sitting in its insular cloud of acclaim, yielding no new surprises or delights after decades of dissection.
 The opening shot of It Follows could have been lifted from John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978): a wide, tranquil suburban street, dotted with autumn-colored leaves, an ominous synth score pulsing in the background. A young girl, scantily clad in a silky nightshirt, runs from her house, terrified. The camera slowly pans to follow her, its presence stealthy and phantasmal. The girl stares at something offscreen. Then she runs back to the house (the camera forming a complete, dazzling 360), tells her father she loves him, and flees in the family sedan. The next morning, we glimpse her corpse on a Michigan beach, mangled in gruesome, impossible directions. It’s one of the best openings of a horror movie—or any movie, really—at least since last year’s Under the Skin.
 Though the Japanese director Sion Sono has released 30 features to date (with four more in the can already), I have to admit I have only seen one: 2008’s Love Exposure, a four-hour mindfuck involving upskirt photography, religious cults, kidnapping, crucifixion, and other perversions. It also happens to be one of the best movies of the 21st century, a jam-packed blitzkrieg on how faith, sex, love, and media intersect in the modern age. Needless to say, I was eager to see Sono’s Why Don’t You Play in Hell?, a bloodstained ode to cinema that has been bouncing around film festivals’ midnight programs for the last year and a half. While it doesn't have the same audacious insanity of Love Exposure (what does?), his latest offering is a deliriously entertaining movie about the allure of movies: perpetually cranked up to 11, reveling in its own outrageousness, Why Don’t You Play in Hell? is the perfect film for those who think Tarantino is too mild-mannered.
 There are films that try to evoke a world and its characters, and then there are those that seem to jettison us into an alternate dimension whose people and places have been existing for years—we’ve just finally been granted access. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Palme d’Or-winning Winter Sleep is one of the latter. With a knotty, multilayered storyline revealed in subtle increments, a feverish devotion to plumbing its characters’ psyches, and (it bears mentioning) its 196-minute running time, Winter Sleep finds its Turkish director at the peak of his powers, aesthetically and philosophically. Like much of Ceylan’s work, Winter Sleep intimately plumbs its characters and their relationships, yet strives to expose them only through suggestion and obfuscation. At the same time, there are elements in Winter Sleep that seem like striking departures from Ceylan’s style—most notably its reliance on precisely scripted dialogue, often conveyed through marathon conversations that help explain the film’s hefty yet transfixing length.
 "Sometimes, it’s the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine."
Picture, if you will, a screenwriter laboring away in a Hollywood loft, tasked with adapting the tumultuous life story of Alan Turing into the kind of inspirational fodder that wins Oscars. Because underdog stories often lead to simplistic, triumphant catharsis, this screenwriter is supposed to emphasize how Turing—humorless, antisocial, distrustful, and (no small matter in 1940s London) homosexual—won World War II for England seemingly singlehandedly by developing a complex computer that could decode Germany’s Enigma encryption device. So our harried screenwriter (in this case Graham Moore) latches on to maudlin lines of dialogue that crudely point out the unlikely historical significance of the film’s central plucky iconoclast, most notably the quotation cited above.  Ever since his debut Amores perros (2000) seemed to herald the arrival of the next Scorsese, the career of Alejandro González Iñárritu has infuriated some and invigorated others. Indeed, the rift between Iñárritu’s fans and detractors is indicative of differing cinematic outlooks: those who like their movies with Big Themes and grandiose dramatic moments, and those who like their movies a little spontaneous, unpredictable, about more than character and theme. The visceral intensity of Amores perros makes it easy to forget that its characters are empty archetypes and its story overindulgent in tragic melodrama. Same with his subsequent films 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006), and Biutiful (2010), all of which have the same central problem (especially horrendous in 21 Grams): they’re so worried about appearing serious and meaningful that they lose grasp of anything human or alive. They’re weighty dramas about the human condition that seem to know very little about it.
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