Mulholland Dr. (2001), David Lynch

Arguably the most conventional of his ‘perplexing’ films, David Lynch’s 2001 Mulholland Dr., a fairy tale with a twisting end, is nonetheless an atmospheric unsolvable jigsaw: dreamlike in its mood and narrative; bleak and austere in its view of human nature and show business.

For over a decade viewers have been trying to unravel the mystery behind Mulholland Dr. A movie which asks viewers to consider differences and similarities between dream and reality is intrinsically playing an ironic game – for, among all art forms, film is the most oneiric one. It is, after all, through lies, artifice and make-believe, that cinema tries to tell the truth. And given that the representation of a dream on the screen is arguably no different from the representation of reality, Mulholland Dr. can play between these two poles and generate genuine disorientation.

Taxi Driver (1976), Martin Scorsese

One of the seminal works of the American New Wave, Martin Scorsese’s 1976 Taxi Driver, a noirish masterpiece about loneliness and alienation with a powerful ambiguity at its core, raises morally important issues without ever leaning towards clear-cut or sanctimonious answers.

Is Travis Bickle a deranged man with psychopathic tendencies or an avenging angel with noble purposes? Are Bickle’s racism and misogyny utterly distinguishable from the other characters’ or purely a reflection of their time and place? Is he really an outsider or simply an extreme representation of that society’s darker side?