Alejandro Jodorowsky may appear like a raving lunatic, but really, he is a genius. He documents the relationship between the cerebral metaphors, symbolism, and social commentary of the conscious mind, and the primal, instinctive sexual desires of ...

I really have no business talking about the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. It's too beautiful, too intelligent, too meaningful, intellectually challenging and disturbingly articulate. To talk about Solaris, Stalker, The Mirror<...

"Tanner, did you really watch all of these Woody Allen movies?" Yes, I really did. Most of them more than once.

I've decided that Woody Allen was both, at different phases in his career, an idiot and a genius. He is currently my f...

David Cronenberg is a prophetic filmmaker. He keeps coming back from the dead, when you least expect it, like Jesus. He is a mastermind of the macabre: wires coming out of people's faces, bugs, ejaculating alien-beings, enormous insects, people go...

Carl Theodor Dreyer is probably the most important figure in film. Everything influential, emotional, profound, painful, and intense, can be traced back to his work, as he was the first guy to do everything, and the first guy to accomplish thin...

Lars von Trier is a dangerous filmmaker. When I say "dangerous", I don't mean physically dangerous like he could hurt you or something, I mean the ideas his films present are often abusively challenging on the mind and emotional state. He dethrone...

Michael Haneke is a dangerous filmmaker, a very cold one, whose characters experience intense detachment, dissolution of love, and dissociation. His films have a remarkably brutal approach to storytelling - see the infanticide of Funny Game...

Eraserhead

Eraserhead is a spiritual journey of a simple man. Henry Spencer, trapped physically in an industrial capitalist hellscape, and trapped emotionally in a loveless forced marr...

My interpretation of Woman in the Dunes: The entomologist is the working class. The village council is the handful of billionaires in capitalism. The rations delivered down are wages, and the barely-livable resources given to the working ...

John Cassavetes is probably the single most important American filmmaker. He was a profound student of human emotion, and he insisted his audiences felt exactly what he was feeling. He did this with an inventive and frankly invasive camera techniq...

Ingmar Bergman was a genius. He was the original master of despair, the wizard of neuroses and emotional trauma. His works are inscribed with real wisdom of both romantic and family relationships. He had an empathy with women, and realistic, sympa...

I think he has some potential, but so far he hasn't made anything too mind-blowing.