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6 Great Movies That Will Overwhelm Your Senses

Movies are more than simply storytelling. It’s often tempting to focus exclusively on the story aspect of cinematic storytelling at the expense of the telling. It’s true that popular feature length movies are almost uniformly concerned with the unfolding of a narrative, but part of the pleasure of watching often comes from the familiarity or strangeness of a world we’re being immersed in. Sometimes this is done in beautiful, artful, and understated ways, and that’s great. What’s unfortunate is when equally beautiful and artful work is dismissed as spectacle or shallow entertainment, because the best of this kind of filmmaking exposes us to a way of seeing and experiencing cinema that’s different and interesting.

5) Detention

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Detention

Director Joseph Kahn is widely recognized for his work on music videos with the likes of Eminem, Katy Perry, Rihanna and many more. His first feature film, Torque, was a pleasantly strange movie released in the midst of The Fast and the Furious’ heyday, but audiences didn’t seem to respond to its creative departures from more conventional racing films. So he went and financed his next feature himself, an insane satire mixing comedy, horror, science fiction, and probably other genres I can’t even remember because there is simply too much going on to properly process it all consciously.

Detention may be an equally tough sell as Torque, but in its madness there is an earnest, deliberate artistic vision that thrives on manic energy and layer upon layer of cultural reference. It’s pleasantly self-conscious and generationally ambivalent, unafraid to take numerous absurd turns and, most importantly, absolutely one of a kind.