With an unerring ability both to describe evil and to place himself in its path, Polanski has created a body of work that never fails to elicit shudders and raise questions. He possesses a mordant insight into the politics of sex and violence, an inherent feel for the macabre, and an eccentric and

Erotic, Excessive, Homoerotic, Perverse, Polish new wave, Psychological

Whether you find them aesthetically refreshing or merely overindulgent, the films of British avant-gardist Derek Jarman always present either visual or emotional surprises. A restlessly inventive film artist and painter, Jarman railed against the conventional stuffiness of what passed for art in his

Experimental, Homoerotic, Pioneering, Political, Psychological, Queer

The son of a Golden-Age Hollywood agent, Independent filmmaker Kenneth Anger has an insider's jaded perspective on the film industry and all that goes with it. His scandalous 1958 expose of celebrity private lives, "Hollywood Babylon" (which discusses, among other things, the genital sizes of various

Avant-garde film, Catastrophe, Death, Homoerotic, Kaleidoscopic, Queer literature, Quirky

A historian of the Swirling Surface, Foucault was not really a philosopher -- in fact, he completely rejected the concept of philosophy. His work is historiographic; he wrote histories of madness, of the medical clinic, of the modern prison, of sexuality. Yet, at the risk of angering his ghost, we mu

Cultural studies/new historicism, Deconstructive, Event, Flux, Funny, Homoerotic, Political, Poststructuralism, Power