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The Phantom of the Monastery is best approached not as a timeless horror film, but as a subversive precursor to Mexican art cinema. Beneath its religious imagery lies a bold exploration of desire, guilt, and repression, anticipating Buñuel’s later work and embracing ambiguity over explanation.

The opening sequence of Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes, Víctor Erice, 2023) made me feel like I was immersed in a Jorge Luis Borges story. Although not technically the case, this is befitting for a Spanish-Argentinian co-production under the assured hand of one of cinema’s last living masters: Spanish director Víctor Erice.

In its obituary for the sui generis director David Lynch (1946-2025), who recently gave up the ghost, The New York Times barely mentioned The Straight Story (David Lynch, 1999), a film that is more often than not regarded as an anomaly in Lynch’s filmography.

Among the thousands of books that have been written trying to elucidate Hitler, there is a remarkable one by Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil.

Before the first consumer-grade videotapes came out in the mid-1970s, it stands to reason that movies were not that readily available for the general public.