Guy Maddin is one of the world's greatest filmmakers. He is an artist with a visual aesthetic and command of cinema surely derived straight from the heavens. His movies explode with fantastic imagery—strange sights that turn his memories and perverted sense of nostalgia into menacing fantasias of great beauty and power. His films always feel like critiques of history and cinema masquerading as tour de force spectacles. For example The Saddest Music in the World works as a critique of the capitalist degradation of art but it also works on such feverish imagery as Isabella Rossellini's strangely beautiful glass legs filled with beer. The plots, such as they are, seem to belong to a different era where "suspension of disbelief" was more bendable than it is now though there's no mistaking Maddin's postmodern sensibility for any time but now. He manages to blend the exclamatory cliches of Russian and German silent film with the camp melodrama of Douglas Sirk, the erotic nightmare quality of primo Noir, and his own offbeat Canadian sense of humor into something totally unique. The only other filmmaker I know of who seems to be a true contemporary of Maddin is David Lynch but even he doesn't seem to be as consistently interesting as Maddin.

Film students across the world come to be familiar with Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour because it's one of the first examples of the "noir" genre; it makes clever use of its low budget and it offers a classic, if simplistic, story on how men and women can manipulate each other into horrendous actions. While all of these are the reasons why the film still holds up today, it's also more fun to think of Detour as the 1940s equivalent of Stranger Than Paradise or Clerks. Super low-budget and completely pioneering in its time for depicting human behavior, this is a film that can still prove to people that quality films can be made outside of Hollywood.

The story opens up on a grizzled and paranoid-looking Al Roberts, who staggers into a diner somewhere in the barren remoteness of Southern California, just outside of Los Angeles. He reacts harshly when somebody in the diner plays a particular song on the jukebox and, after apologizing and being nearly kicked out, he drinks his coffee and begins to tell his story over narration.