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Midnight Movie Provocations

Watch these when you want cinema at its most gorgeously deranged — cult objects that turn desire, violence, and pure anarchy into their own strange grace.

Film-school and midnight-movie touchstones rather than crowd favorites — formally radical and sexually, violently frank, proudly not for everyone; save them for a night you're up for being provoked.

• El Topo (1970)
• Daisies (1966)
• Wild at Heart (1990)
• Crash (1996)
• The Holy Mountain (1973) — The overlooked Jodorowsky that rhymes directly with El Topo — same alchemical, blasphemous surrealism cranked even wilder, so if his midnight lineage grabbed you, this is the one still sitting unwatched.
• Titane (2021) — The under-seen one to finally pull down if Crash's erotics of metal and flesh got under your skin — a feral, motor-oil body-horror that carries Cronenberg's cold desire into something newly deranged.
• Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990) — The overlooked Almodóvar that rhymes with these on transgressive desire — a bondage-tinged captivity romance played frank and unrepentant, provocation dressed as a love story you forgot to watch.