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.

Bad Lieutenant (1992)
Betting money he doesn’t have, letting robbery suspects walk, boozing it up with whores, smoking heroin with a gamine-ish smack connoisseur, pulling over a pair of bridge-and-tunnelers and pulling out—no, it’s too much. Harvey Keitel’s performance as the world’s most rotten cop has a stunning, savage honesty. Stripped naked and howling, he’s an open wound, the supreme passion player in what is, finally, a tale of redemption and one of the few truly religious films of the 20th century.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
As shocking and stomach-churning as the picture’s legendary ambush-atrocity ending is, it only really works in context—that is, after you’ve spent more than an hour and a half getting to like the messed-up, bumbling, perhaps-not-quite-irredeemable criminals who are on the receiving end of a seemingly endless hail of bullets. (Their demise takes up only 21 seconds of screen time, but you’re praying “Make it stop!” throughout.) Outlaw lovers, incarnated by two of Hollywood’s most physically beautiful stars (Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway), are reduced to carrion in nothing flat, and the rest is silence—deafening silence.

Boys Don’t Cry (1999)
“I don’t know who I am.” Such is the plaint of, well, just about everybody in this world at one time or another. Brandon Teena’s problem was that she did know who she was, but her body did not conform to it. Or perhaps that’s not it at all. Director Kim berly Peirce’s debut feature tells the true story of a Nebraskan girl (played, in a career-making performance, by Hilary Swank) who passed herself off as a boy and, in so doing, helped other girls find themselves. Boys Don’t Cry would be powerful and provocative enough if all it did was make you think hard about the difficult questions it raises concerning identity and difference. But the movie goes even further by showing how simple human violence can render such questions moot.

Un Chien Andalou (1929)
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s infamous 16-minute film insouciantly mocks would-be explicators with its uninterpretable images, which cook up a death’s-head soup of anxiety. The liquid of the slashed eyeball, the putrefying wounds of the dead donkeys that adorn a pair of grand pianos, the blood caking on the chin of a man in the throes of unspeakable sexual ecstasy—the movie is a sticky orgy of lust, ooze, and rot, no less funny for its power to get under your skin and stay there.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Its director, Stanley Kubrick, obviously thought this picture was dangerous in a more than merely existential way: In 1972, he withdrew it from exhibition in Great Britain—a self-imposed ban, if you will, that stayed in place until March 2000, a year after Kubrick’s death. The ignorant brutality (coexisting so comfortably with rakish charm) of its droog antihero Alex is one thing; the picture’s indictment of society’s ability to give birth to such brutality and then have no clue about how to deal with it is another. But what makes the film really hurt is its cold, clinical kick in the teeth to things we used to consider innocent sources of pure joy—e.g., the song “Singin’ in the Rain.”

Dancer in the Dark (2000)
Splicing together The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and A Short Film About Killing onto a grim fairy-tale spine, Lars von Trier’s divisive musical tragedy is some kind of filmmaker’s film, to be sure. But whether you’re familiar with its influences or not, the relentlessness of its tragic-story trajectory and the almost embarrassing intensity and intimacy of Björk’s performance, as the ultimate self-sacrificing mom (she makes Stella Dallas look like Auntie Mame), combine to produce a viewing experience that’s at first intriguing, then uncomfortable, then utterly overwhelming. It’s a little facile to call Dancer an anti–death penalty parable, but then again, it might be worthwhile to screen it for the capital-punishment maven in your life.

Dead Ringers (1988)
David Cronenberg takes the notion of the divided self beyond mere metaphor in this story (suggested by actual events) of identical twin gynecologists (both played, impeccably, by Jeremy Irons) and their descent into madness. The subject matter alone ensures an almost unprecedented level of creepiness, and you can bet Cronenberg makes the most of it; when one of the twins commissions a set of surgical tools for use on “mutant women” (for he is just about at the point where he thinks all women are mutants), it’s permanent gooseflesh time. But the picture ultimately goes deeper, plunging us into the desperate, confused loneliness to which we are all prey, whether we’re cursed with doppelgängers or not.

Eraserhead (1977)
You’ve heard of new-wave movies? David Lynch’s debut is a no-wave movie, projecting a fear of sex (among other things) so palpable that one could deem it the male-perspective version of Repulsion. Shot in deepest, darkest black and white, it sees universes in clouds of eraser dust and contains a chicken scene that outdoes both John Waters and the Farrelly brothers. The fact that Lynch still hasn’t revealed how he made the movie’s notorious baby just makes the sight of it more squirm-inducing with each viewing. Not to be watched, under any circumstances, by expectant couples.