The 25 Most Dangerous Movies Ever Made

These are movies about which you could say, "That's Not Entertainment." They're not "rides" or "diversions." They are galvanizing experiences that place squarely in your face all the stuff Hollywood usually presumes you go to the movies to get away from. Films that rearrange your head, that challenge your bedrock ideas about life and love and the big sleep. Consciousness-expanders, in other words, but rarely in a pleasant way. Thank God for them.

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1. Weekend (1967)

Apocalypse '67. A bickering bourgeois couple, already drunk on betrayal, set out on a little excursion. It goes very badly even before it starts. From the epic traffic jam they almost immediately drive into, to a diversion into a curdled Lewis Carroll parody, to a final capitulation to a group of counterculture cannibals who make the future Baeder-Meinhof crew look like the Mickey Mouse club, Jean-Luc Godard's film — a work completely drained of the sort of exuberance that marked his debut, Breathless, — is an exhausting proof of Yeats's prediction that "things fall apart/the centre cannot hold." As much an expectoration as a work of art, Weekend's entirely apt and believable end title reads "Fin du Cinema."

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