Materialists

 

Writer/director Celine Song

director on the set with Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans

director with Dakota Johnson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MATERIALISTS       C+                                                                                                           USA  Finland  (117 mi)  2025  d: Celine Song

Marriage is a business deal and it always has been.                                                                    —Lucy (Dakota Johnson)

From the maker of the highly celebrated Past Lives (2023), a smaller, indie-styled film that brought intelligence and a melancholic intimacy to the immigrant experience, yet this is a complete turnaround from that, where you wonder what this director had in mind, opting for a lightweight, mainstream romance comedy that veers from sheer fantasy to darker realities, never really distinguishing itself in any way, with no real likeable characters except a rather unremarkable down-and-out actor whose career is stalled, with the world seemingly passing him by, yet he’s at least identifiable.  The way the film plays out, it’s his very ordinariness that stands out, offering a distinctive appeal that no other character has, as he’s relatable and more openly human.  The other characters, not so much, feeling like they exist in some fantasy world, like an extension of the artificiality of Greta Gerwig’s BARBIE (2023), where love is callously viewed as a business transaction.  The film invests a lot of energy developing that theme, luring us into a world where money makes everything better, where the luxuries of life are equated with success and the American Dream, making the subjects feel like they are finally worthy of love, which is all a rather pretentiously ridiculous entry into the world of romance, like it’s part of a capitalist realization, holding up a mirror to just how shallow we are as a society, with the explosion of social media becoming increasingly calculating and crudely insensitive, extending a social class prejudice that without money love doesn’t exist.  This, of course, only exists in the world of movies, which is notoriously described as a dream machine.  So right from the outset it’s hard to get behind this movie, which isn’t that different from Sean Baker’s Academy Award-winning Anora (2024), which also equated love with money and success.  Once money is removed from the situation, love dies like a house of cards, sending characters into a tailspin of emotional turmoil.  So apparently this is the current fascination of Hollywood, (The Rise of the Anti-Cinderella Story).  What message this conveys about real life is hard to measure, as these feel like exaggerated circumstances that bear no resemblance to the lives we are actually living, unlike the satirical comedies of Roy Andersson, for instance, whose SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000) and YOU, THE LIVING (2007) bring a Kafkaesque absurdity to the forefront of the living, accentuating the absurd and comical elements of simple everyday situations.  But that’s not what this is, as it feels wrapped in a consumerist paradise on display, where monetary value is equated with human value, which is ethically problematic.  But in this case, the title says it all, as it means what it says.  As a playwright, Song has an ear for dialogue, but the relatively bland characters continually utter what sounds like scripted dialogue that feels superficially one-dimensional, where you wonder what really drew the filmmaker to this insipid material, though one should never underestimate the importance of romance.  In a different era any film posing the question whether to marry for love or for money would have been relegated to a Chick flick, a notoriously derogatory term, played for a healthy mix of laughs and sex appeal in Howard Hawks’ star-driven cinematic spectacle of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), or any Judy Holliday movie from the same time period.  While there are some interesting musical choices, like Baby Rose singing a soulful classic at a wedding that has been covered by many jazz and blues artists since the 50’s, That's All YouTube (3:26), Marc Webb’s much more inventive and better acted (500) Days of Summer (2009) blows this out of the water.  Watching people fall in love is a lost art in contemporary movies, as they began to disappear from theaters as soon as people started calling them rom-coms, (Where Have Rom-Coms Gone? (And Our Nostalgic ...), now lost in the rush to produce huge blockbusters, often premiering on streaming platforms. 

Opening in a strange prelude sequence that makes us feel that we’re in another movie, it’s a story of first love in an era of cavemen during the Stone Age, something of a stretch in conceiving an Adam and Eve scenario of the first humans to fall in love, but we’re quickly rushed back into the present as we’re introduced to Lucy (Dakota Johnson, daughter of actor Don Johnson and actress Melanie Griffith), an extremely successful matchmaker for a high-end dating service whose latest couples pairing success is her 9th marriage, receiving applause and adulation from her coworkers at Adore Matchmaking, a Manhattan-based company that strives to bring couples together, suggesting they will find the right partner – for a price.  Dating apps, or in this case matchmaking services, lead to people buying and trading themselves like merchandise, ostensibly designed to make things easier, but the reality is much darker and more complicated.  Shot on 35mm by Shabier Kirchner, who also shot her earlier film, this bears some resemblance to Elizabeth Lo’s Chinese documentary Mistress Dispeller (2024), as the director draws from personal experience working for 6 months as a professional matchmaker a decade ago for exclusively affluent people in order to fund her writing career, but this feels more fantasy based, as everything revolves around money, suggesting love can be bought and customized, with clients making ridiculously precise, superficial specifications of exactly what they are looking for, like picking out a house or a piece of furniture.  At the wedding of her latest success story, she repeats the mantra, “Who our partner is determines our whole life,” before meeting the brother of the groom, Harry (Pedro Pascal), an extravagantly wealthy financial capitalist who represents the pinnacle of success, the ultimate “catch,” described in the business as a unicorn, supposedly everything any woman could dream of, intelligent, tall, handsome, and filthy rich, checking all the boxes, as they say.  While he overhears her sales pitch while passing out business cards, he expresses a genuine interest in meeting her, but she defers, suggesting he pursue romantic prospects through Adore, hoping he will find the perfect match.  While they are flirting, however, in something of a comical surprise, Lucy runs into her more disheveled ex-boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), working as a server at the wedding, bringing her drink of choice, where it’s clear they have a history together.  A struggling actor, he’s looking for extra income, as we quickly learn that their relationship fizzled due to money concerns when both were struggling actors, a dream he has continued to pursue, though he still doesn’t have a manager, won’t take commercial jobs, yet is upset with the way his life has turned out.   In stark contrast is another one of Lucy’s long-time clients, Sophie (Zoë Winters), who has repeatedly struck out in the dating game, becoming a seemingly hopeless case, with Adore, supposedly experts in achieving that perfect match, discovering it’s very difficult to find the man of her dreams, privately asserting “There’s no place in the market for her.”  When Lucy sets her up with that perfect date, he ends up sexually assaulting her in what amounts to date rape, a disastrous turn of events that precipitates a lawsuit against the company, where it’s clear these are lives that are being toyed with.  Despite the background checks and aligning all the perfect algorithms, occasionally a dark and sinister character slips through, inflicting enormous damage, as Sophie’s self-esteem plummets, leaving her emotionally and psychologically devastated, feeling permanently scarred, yet the company doesn’t like to talk about failures, as it’s all about conveying success to a public that needs to believe in dreams.  What’s clear at the outset is how the company views relationships as assets and liabilities, suggesting dating is a calculated risk, like a financial investment, so what this film really lacks is the personal intimacy created in Song’s earlier film.  

With that in mind, Lucy starts dating Harry on her own, where, exactly like Anora, she’s quickly won over by the massive scale of his financial success, living in a $12 million dollar Tribeca penthouse while leading an immensely privileged lifestyle, showing impeccable taste, regularly taking her to all the upscale expensive restaurants that most people can only afford on special occasions, becoming a whirlwind affair of glamor and indulgence, just like the man of her dreams.  While everything points to that perfect Prince Charming Hollywood scenario playing out before our eyes, the director suddenly subverts those expectations, pulling the rug out from under us and chooses to go in a different direction, with the film getting messier and more complicated, as it turns out she doesn’t really love her perfect match, while he himself may be incapable of love, refusing to allow himself to be exposed to that degree of emotional vulnerability.  It’s all about success, pressing the right buttons, making all the right decisions to maintain his quality of life, which he values more than anything else, even her.  While this may come as something as a surprise, the real surprise was seeing walkouts when viewers were disappointed to discover this was not a happily-ever-after storybook ending, suggesting viewer expectation plays a large role in this film, as it doesn’t follow the script, veering off on an unexpected tangent, as she breaks up with Harry, only to find herself evaluating her own life, spending more time with John, who lives that typical working class life where daily frustrations play into what he’s constantly forced to deal with, yet he’s maintained a certain trust with Lucy even after their breakup, never actually falling out of love with her, offering a sympathetic ear whenever she needs it.  As fate would have it, she sublets her apartment for a week as she was planning to be whisked off to Iceland with Harry before they amicably broke things off, leaving her stranded, without a place to stay, but John’s multiple roommates live in apartment squalor, so that’s not really an option, instead they head on an upstate road excursion together in his beat-up Volvo, where they spontaneously crash a wedding staged at an outdoor countryside barn, suddenly taking themselves more seriously, finally asking those existential questions, like are they really back together again.  In the end, not sure it actually matters, as the soulless characters display no actual chemistry onscreen and are simply not compelling enough for us to care, where it all seems to play out in a land of make believe, where the materialistic view of life is just as much of a scam as the Prince Charming view of romance, with marriage viewed as a means to climb the social ladder, exactly as it was back in the days of Jane Austen novels.  On the day before the film release, the director provided a “movie syllabus” list of films that influenced the making of the film, many of which go back to the 80’s and 90’s, most likely films the director grew up watching, Materialists movie syllabus via Celine - A24 - X, but this feels more like the escapist television series Sex and the City than any of those referenced films, which conspicuously leaves out Susan Sandler’s play turned into her own film adaptation in Joan Micklin Silver’s CROSSING DELANCEY (1988), where it would be easy to imagine Kate Hudson, Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, or Rachel McAdams inhabiting this role with similar results, though it does attempt to get under the surface.  Arguably the best scene is the closing credits sequence, a long, well-choreographed final shot that exudes personality and diversity, topped off by a wonderfully quirky John Prine song, originally written for Billy Bob Thornton’s DADDY AND THEM (2001), but featuring a superb rendition with Iris DeMent, John Prine and Iris DeMent - In Spite of Ourselves (Live From ... YouTube (5:04). 

Babylon

 

Director Damien Chazelle on the set

Chazelle with cinematographer Linus Sandgren

Chazelle with Brad Pitt and Diego Calva

Chazelle with musical composer Justin Hurwitz

BABYLON                B                                                                                                                 USA  (189 mi)  2022  ‘Scope  d: Damien Chazelle

A child born in fifty years will stumble across your image flickering on a screen and feel he knows you, like a friend, even though you breathed your last before he breathed his first.  You’ve been given a gift.  Be grateful.  Your time today is through, but you’ll spend eternity with angels and ghosts.                   —Elinor St. John (Jean Smart)

From the maker of Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009), Whiplash (2014), and 2016 Top Ten List #10 La La Land, which soared to 14 Oscar nominations, becoming the youngest ever Oscar winner for Best Director, this $80 million dollar extravaganza is not for the faint of heart, as this could also be known as Sodom and Gomorrah goes to Hollywood, becoming an exposé on the outsized ambition and outrageous excess in the early days of Hollywood, tracing the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity, where this bombastic saga takes on the grand-scale myths of Hollywood lore from yesteryear, like a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza selling a grotesquely exaggerated vision of reckless hedonism, becoming a walking travelogue through the hidden pre-Code secrets of an out-of-control industry.  Setting its sights on exposing the sordid, darker underbelly of Hollywood history, which they have been so adept at sweeping under the rug, the film bombed at the box office, where the more than three-hour run time for a Christmas release might be a factor, along with poor marketing, while historical films tend to be hit or miss with movie audiences, but the ostentatiousness and grandiose spectacle on display is much like Ruben Östlund in Triangle of Sadness (Sans Filtre) (2022), as both use projectile vomiting and diarrhea scenes for grotesque humor, seemingly on a similar wavelength of crude condescension, and while LA LA LAND was a love letter to the hopeful dreamers of Tinseltown, this feels more like a “Fuck you” letter to the industry, pushing the limits beyond all established limits, where it’s doubtful Chazelle will ever get the same opportunity again, so he shot the wad with this one.  While much has been made about matching certain fictional characters to their real-life counterparts, that’s not really a factor, as the boundaries between imagination and reality are blurred, where it neither enhances nor detracts from the storyline, becoming a multi-character tragicomic epic set at the twilight of the silent era, where if we learn anything it’s that Hollywood is a place of dreams and pain in equal measure.  Spanning from 1926 to 1952, this is an uneven, yet outlandish film that’s hugely ambitious, but never lives up to expectations, as there’s an emotional disconnect with all the characters, with blatant attempts at humor that mostly fall flat, and while there are moments of brilliance, much of this ends up feeling overly trite and predictable.  Bearing some resemblance to David Fincher’s Mank (2020), with both offering inside glimpses into a world of often drunk, drugged out, and chaotic individuals who thrive in the industry, each establishing behind-the-scenes connections to the lavish weekend parties of William Randolph Hearst, where his Hearst Castle becomes a resort for Hollywood’s royalty during the Roaring Twenties and into the 30’s, including stars, directors, producers, and writers, where California is viewed as both a Garden of Eden and a land of material opportunity, ultimately satirized by Orson Welles in CITIZEN KANE (1941).  On a desolate hilltop in the Bel Air desert, inside the fairytale mansion of Hollywood producer Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin, bearing more than a passing resemblance to Harvey Weinstein), we are witness early on to the orgiastic frenzy of a 30-minute party sequence set to the exhilarating music written by Chazelle’s longtime musical composer Justin Hurwitz, Voodoo Mama (Official Audio) – Babylon Original ... - YouTube (3:59), which sets the tempo, something you might expect from Baz Luhrmann in The Great Gatsby (2013), a filmmaker known for his lavish extravagance, but this is an unrivaled, no-holds-barred scenario with quick cuts combined with longer takes that feels breathtaking in the way Linus Sandgren’s bravura 35mm camerawork simply glides through the Felliniesque bacchanal festivities like poetry in motion, where viewers are literally immersed in the excess, debauchery, and revulsion of the experience.  Shown on 70mm in a few theaters, yet compared to this, what went on in Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) seems relatively tame.      

While we have seen this kind of satiric Hollywood history rehash before in the Coen brother’s Hail, Caesar! (2016), nothing really prepares us for the exaggerated histrionics and massive scale of this film, which dares to go where others refused to go, elevating bad taste to an operatic artform while luridly swinging for the fences in attempting to capture the shallowness and moral void at the center of this business.  Three central characters are introduced early on, Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a star-gazing Mexican emigrant who dreams of making his way up the Hollywood ladder (“I just want to be part of something bigger!”) but remains stuck on the outskirts of fame, employed as an errand boy for media mogul William Randolph Hearst (Pat Skipper), where he runs into Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a loud and brashly impulsive, would-be actress from New Jersey appropriately dressed for the occasion, but she’s not on the invite list, so Manny whisks her inside where they partake in a mountainous pile of readily available cocaine before hitting the dance floor.  Manny falls instantly in love, enamored by all the stardom and glamor, but she’s just there for a wild time, becoming an instant hit, dazzling the eyes of party revelers and viewers, where the intoxicating sequence goes for the juggler, driven by the furious pace of the music, taking us on a roller coaster ride, setting the tone for what follows, Babylon (2022) - The Orgy Dance Scene | Movieclips YouTube (2:30).  While they are merely periphery players, the grand entrance is reserved for Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a matinee idol whose extreme arrogance and eccentric personality is modeled after John Gilbert, MGM’s biggest silent movie star and producer at the peak of his star power, the man who helped build Hollywood into the multi-billion dollar conglomerate that it is today.  Jack is the face of the movie industry, fawned over by adoring fans, with everyone trying to get into his ear, but he’s an unflappable character, clearly in his element in the midst of the delirium of surrounding chaos, with a propensity for getting wildly inebriated, yet shows up on the set the next morning ready to work.  In addition, the sequence features black jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), a lesbian Chinese-American cabaret singer modeled after Anna May Wong, dressed in a top hat and tuxedo singing “My Girl’s Pussy,” My Girl's Pussy by Justin Hurwitz in Babylon (2022) Cabaret ... YouTube (2:30), with both also craving the spotlight, while Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), a gossip columnist turned grand dame of Hollywood journalists, offers her own first-hand accounts of the day-to-day trials and tribulations, providing a checkered history that is filled with looming themes of transience and sadness, with Chazelle and his editor Tom Cross cleverly weaving these stories together while referencing some of the classic ensemble films.  Manny proves his meddle by devising an ingenious diversionary plan to escort a dead woman who has overdosed out of the party in plain view without anyone noticing, with Nellie chosen to take her place on the set the next day.  Jack takes Manny under his wing as his personal assistant, driving him home to his own palatial estate, becoming a trusted confidant, an everyman bearing witness to the idiosyncratic methods of making movies on an outdoor set with multiple productions shot simultaneously, fascinated by the pandemonium and complete disarray in what he sees, with a timeline separating distinctly different sets in operation, including a sprawling action sequence directed by Otto Von Strassberger (Spike Jonze in a German accent) that goes haywire, killing one of the actors (turned into a sight gag), as real weapons are used, suggesting it’s a Wild West out there, destroying all their existing cameras as well, but all that matters is that they got the shot, Getting The Shot Of The Soldiers Fighting - Babylon (2022) Scene YouTube (2:42).  Erupting out of this chaos, occasional magic occurs, as Manny saves the day by making an emergency run afterwards to secure another operating camera, a scene that borders on the ridiculous, and the miraculous, revealing the remarkable spirit of an era that has come and gone, BABYLON - First 8 Minutes Opening Scene (2022) YouTube (8:20).

Jack sends Manny to New York to see Al Jolson in THE JAZZ SINGER (1927) and report back on the new sensation of talking pictures, which would change the industry, driving most of the silent era actors out of business as their overdramatic theatrics don’t play so well in sound pictures.  While Jack wants to be part of the future and make accommodations to the changing times, his wooden acting doesn’t play so well with audiences, which throws him for a loop, as he’s never tasted anything but success before.  Nellie becomes an instant silent film success, a rags to riches character based on starlet Clara Bow, the scandalous “It-Girl,” but her shrill Jersey accent never plays well in the tightly restricted atmosphere of a sound studio, where she is the living example of the growing pains that came with the transition into unchartered territory, Babylon (2022) Retake Scene Over & Over Again YouTube (3:05).  The film depicts a time when Los Angeles was a desert community of rootless transplants growing into a world-class city, where Hollywood in particular was operating in a no-holds-barred kind of world, wilder, more aggressive, while still tinkering and experimenting with an industry format that was still being built.  For instance, there’s an early scene of the beginning stages of the infamous number that would eventually end up in Gene Kelly and Stanley Donan’s Singin' in the Rain (1952), regarded today as a masterpiece of the classical Hollywood musical.  But in the early stages actors were used to simply standing in place and singing, not moving around or dancing, where motion was not yet integrated into the medium.  In this side-by-side comparison, Jack reveals his personal reservations as Chazelle’s film is seen juxtaposed against Charles Reisner’s THE HOLLYWOOD REVUE OF 1929, Singin In the Rain 1929. Babylon comparación. - YouTube (1:14), while there is yet another version of the same song, Singing in the Rain - YouTube (4:18), offering an unusual historical perspective.  Chazelle unabashedly shows the dark side of the industry where even the mighty must fall, viewed as inevitable, as gossip columnist Elinor St. John will explain to a devastated Jack Conrad why his career is over and how insignificant that ending will be to Hollywood history, Best scene of Babylon YouTube (4:50), which is even more tragic considering ninety percent of all silent films are estimated to be lost.  Manny eventually finds a place as a movie executive, but does so at the expense of his moral integrity and racial identity, as he ends up passing for white, ignoring his own family for years, though they live nearby.  This plays out in devastating fashion when it comes to musician Sidney Palmer, a black man who actually made it in Hollywood, until the moment when the powers that be decide his skin is too light for the camera, and may not play well in the South, setting the stage for the indignity of “blackface,” a racial subtext within the industry that still lingers today.  As Palmer, Jovan Adepo is able to express all the humiliation and psychological damage that Hollywood has inflicted for generations, Manny Makes Sidney Palmer DARKEN HIS FACE - Babylon (2022) Movie Scene YouTube (3:00), transitioning perfectly into another sequence, Sidney Palmer Plays The Babylon Theme Tune Perfectly - Babylon (2022) Scene YouTube (2:30), offering a poignant eulogy for a forgotten era.  One of the most grotesque twists is a surrealistic descent into the dark underbelly of the beast, a subterranean dungeon where the layers of Hell resemble Dante’s Inferno, described as the “asshole of Los Angeles,” where the depravity of the industry on steroids is a fantasy crime scene selling its soul to the highest bidder.  For the finale the film jumps ahead thirty years and finds an aging Manny revisiting his former stomping grounds, where its cleaned-up image turns into a CINEMA PARADISO (1988) moment of movie rapture with a spellbinding montage of movie clips that is nothing short of sensational, Babylon (2022) - The Ending Montage Scene | Movieclips YouTube (2:57), offering a one-of-a-kind exposé that can be as stupefying as it is enthralling.  

Note

Prior to shooting the film, from the fall of 2018 through the spring of 2019, Chazelle and executive producer Matthew Plouffe organized private screenings in empty theaters to screen 35mm prints of films they felt consciously tried to push the boundaries of cinema while expanding the viewing experience.  Included in this eclectic mix were the following films, D. W. Griffith’s INTOLERANCE (1916), William Wellman’s WINGS (1927), G. W. Pabst’s Pandora's Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) (1928), Jean Renoir’s THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939), Orson Welles’ CITIZEN KANE (1941) and TOUCH OF EVIL (1958), Federico Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA (1960), Luchino Visconti’s THE LEOPARD (1963), Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (Il Conformista) (1970), Bob Fosse’s CABARET (1972), Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990), Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN (1974), Francis Ford Coppola’s THE GODFATHER Part II (1974) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), Stanley Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON (1975), Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), Terrence Malick’s DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978), Michael Cimino’s THE DEER HUNTER (1978), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) and There Will Be Blood (2007), and Wong Kar-wai’s IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000).

Every movie referenced in the 'Babylon' ending montage  Calum Russell from Far Out magazine

• The Horse in Motion (Eadweard Muybridge, 1878)
• Cat Galloping (Eadweard Muybridge, 1887)
• The Arrival of a Train (Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1895)
• Annie Oakley (1894) – Thomas Edison’s earliest Kinetoscope
• Birth of the Pearl (F.S. Armitage, 1901)
• A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902)
• Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (Ferdinand Zecca, 1902)
• The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903)
• Little Nemo (Winsor McCay, 1911)
• Intolerance (D.W. Griffith, 1916)
• The Champion (Charlie Chaplin, 1915)
• The Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915–1916)
• Joan the Woman (Cecil B. DeMille, 1916)
• Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, 1920)
• Voice of the Nightingale (Ladislaw Starewicz, 1925)
• Le Ballet Mécanique (Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy, 1924)
• The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927)
• Black and Tan (Dudley Murphy, 1929)
• Hollywood Review of 1929 (Charles Reisner, 1929)
• Piccadilly (Ewald André Dupont, 1929)
• The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)
• Ivan the Terrible, Part 2 (Sergi Eisenstein, 1944)
• Tarantella (Mary Ellen Bute, Norman McLaren & Ted Nemeth, 1940)
• Love Letter (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1953)
• Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
• Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones, Merrie Melodies, 1953)
• This is Cinerama (Mike Todd, Michael Todd, Jr., Walter A. Thompson and Fred Rickey, 1952)
• Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) 
• Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929) 
• Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1969) 
• Dreams That Money Can Buy (Hans Richter, 1947)
• Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, Alexandr Hackenschmied, 1943)
• The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
• My Life to Live (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962) 
• Lucia (Humberto Solás, 1968)
• NY. NY. (Francis Thompson, 1947) 
• Borom Sarret (Ousmane Sembène, 1963) 
• Le Ballet Mécanique (Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy, 1924)
• The Black Vampire (Román Viñoly Barreto, 1953) 
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
• Week-End (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
• Matrix 1 (John Whitney, Sr., 1971)
• 0–45 (TV Cultura de São Paulo, 1974) 
• Sunstone (Ed Emshwiller, Alvy Ray Smith, Lance Williams, Garland Stern, 1979)
• Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)
• Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982)
• Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991)
• Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
• The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999)
• Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)
• Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1965)