![]() Abrams's Star Wars: Episode VII-The Force Awakens and Colin Trevorrow's Jurassic World (both 2015). ![]() Paradigm-changing narrative filmmakers have always been relatively rare-think Andrei Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman, Vĕra Chytilová, Alain Resnais, and Robert Altman at their respective peaks-and there is little doubt that in today's marketplace a sublime baffler such as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) could not effectively compete with retreads like J.J. It can be great intellectual fun to engage with films that are admirably impenetrable in whole or in part, made by writers, directors, and producers willing to break out of traditional molds without entering the rarified zone of avant-garde radicalism inhabited by, say, Michael Snow, Maya Deren, and Stan Brakhage, as indispensable as those great artists are. Footnote 1 I was thinking of movies such as David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) and Inland Empire (2006) and Shane Carruth's Primer (2004) and Upstream Color (2013), all of which hold seemingly endless interpretive possibilities. ![]() ![]() Coediting a book of essays about B movies a few years ago, I wanted to include a section on what I called puzzle pictures, films that take the risk of challenging the audience-and probably losing a lot of the audience-with unusual stories framed in unorthodox structures and styles.
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