Rodney Ascher

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Demon Lover Diary

If Hearts of Darkness tells a similar story to Apocalypse Now, Demon Lover Diary is as much a horror film as Demon Lover, the forgotten midwestern Satanic thriller whose catastrophic making it documents. It’s also a very funny, sometimes poignant portrait of an America that no longer exists.

The Limey

An anti-revenge story that becomes a kaleidoscopic memory piece as we flash between images of Los Angeles at the end of the century, home movies of a family vacation, the dream of the '60s, and scenes from an entirely different film. As fluidly as they intercut, each of those times and places prove to be as lost to one another as this father and daughter.

Psycho

Simultaneously a worshipful tribute to an iconic classic, a moustache on the Mona Lisa, and a heroically doomed attempt to bring appropriation art to the multiplex.

The Atomic Cafe

This film (along with The Thin Blue Line and Koyaanisqatsi) demolished any preconceived notions in my mind of what a non-fiction film could look like or accomplish.

Starship Troopers

A pre-emptive satire of the 21st century that would be terrifying if it wasn’t so funny (or is it the other way around?).

Fantastic Mr. Fox

A witty, raucous and romantic portrait of family life hidden in a gargantuan, hand-crafted dollhouse diorama.

Premonitions Following an Evil Deed

In a single minute, on an ancient camera with no synch sound, Lynch creates a perfectly incomplete murder-mystery / Freudian sci-fi dreamscape / emotional time-bomb / jigsaw puzzle. Edited in camera, it includes the largest conceptual leaps between shots this side of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Brazil

My first viewing had me in goosebumps at the shock of seeing what could only be my own half-remembered dreams projected 30 feet high.

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

A chilling and moving collision of style and substance. Endlessly influential.

A Movie

aka The Big Bang.