By far the most heady and artsy film on the list, Pier Paolo Pasolini s Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom is also one of the most disturbing and (dare we say) damaging. There are very few films that, upon viewing, will have us running to the showers to try and scrub ourselves clean. This is one of those films.

The premise is fairly simple: a group of wealthy, influential, and severely deranged fascists in World War 2-era Italy kidnap a group of teenage boys and girls from their villages, lock them away in their compounds, and spend the next weeks using them to re-enact the Marquis De Sade s 120 Days of Sodom. So over the course of the film they strip them down, humiliate them, make them eat feces, molest them, rape them and ultimately publicly dismember and execute them.

The end.

Feel good movie of the year? We don t think so. The film does have a lot to say about the nature of power and the corruptive attraction of pure fascism, and is considered a work of art by the film community (it was released as part of the highly esteemed Criterion Collection DVD s, which is extremely rare and expensive). Don t let that fool you though, this film is nasty, dirty, puerile, and may scar you for life (if you can get your hands on a copy).