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How you situate Sergio Leone’s epic, acerbic A Fistful of Dynamite within the filmmaker’s larger body of work just might depend on which title it bears when you watch it. The original Italian title, Giù la testa, is probably best rendered by the thematically appropriate Keep Your Head Down, but Leone insisted the film go out under the looser translation Duck, You Sucker! It’s a line that recurs several times throughout the film, one that Leone insisted was authentic American slang of the era, though clearly it isn’t any such thing.

The replacement title A Fistful of Dynamite attempts to link it with Leone’s earlier A Fistful of Dollars, but this one gets far darker and more serious than the more “innocent” tales of adventure that form the Dollars trilogy. Probably the most appropriate title was the one applied to it by the French: Once Upon a Time…...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Luis Buñuel's Viridiana (1961) is showing June 17 - July 17 and The Exterminating Angel (1962) is showing June 18 - July 18, 2017 in the United Kingdom.ViridianaIt’s impossible to avoid describing the films of Spanish director Luis Buñuel as “surreal,” and yet to do so is woefully insufficient. This is for two reasons. In the first place, Buñuel never made one kind of film. In the second place, even his strangest films deal with social reality.Early in his career Buñuel did associate himself with the Surrealist art movement. Among his first productions were the infamous Un chien Andalou (1929) and L'âge d'or (1930), experimental narratives co-written by Salvador Dali in which bizarre and violent psychosexual incidents connect via absurd dream logic. It’s worth bearing in mind that the Surrealists never meant “surreal” to act as a mere label for the uniquely strange.

Viridiana

Written by Julio Alejandro and Luis Buñuel

Directed by Luis Buñuel

Spain/Mexico, 1961

The Cannes Film Festival has long been a venue to court controversy, and filmmaker Luis Buñuel was likewise one who consistently reveled in the divisive. At the 1961 festival, Buñuel brought his latest release, Viridiana, and the results were spectacular, and spectacularly contentious. The film, which shared Palme d’Or honors with Henri Colpi’s The Long Absence, was subsequently met with charges of blasphemy from the Vatican’s newspaper, and it was promptly banned in Buñuel ‘s native Spain.

The Spanish reaction was particularly critical. Viridiana’s production in Buñuel’s place of birth was already a hot topic. Having left for America and Mexico in 1939, Spain’s surrealist native son was back home, the adamantly leftist filmmaker now working amidst Francisco Franco’s fascist dictatorship. What’s the worst that could happen?

Viridiana is what happened,...

And here we are. The day after Easter and we’ve reached the top of the mountain. While compiling this list, it’s become evident that true religious films just aren’t made anymore (and if they are, they are widely panned). That being said, religious themes exist in more mainstream movies than ever, despite there being no deliberate attempts to dub the films “religious.” Faith, God, whatever you want to call it – it’s influenced the history of nations, of politics, of culture, and of film. And these are the most important films in that wheelhouse. There are only two American films in the top 10, and only one of them is in English.

courtesy of hilobrow.com

10. Andrei Rublev (1966)

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

A brutally expansive biopic about the Russian iconographer divided into nine chapters. Andrei Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn) is portrayed not as a silent monk, but a motivated artist working against social ruin,...