This is similar to the old "what's your favorite movie" threads, except that it's a personal request for help.
We watch a rented movie every Sunday, and Hollywood just doesn't make 52 good movies a year. So we've already seen the obvious things - Acadamy Award winners and classics of every genre and decade. Now we need to move farther afield. Please give me your recommendations of unusual, offbeat or overlooked (but still possible to find) motion pictures. Nothing is off limits except excessive violence.
Thank you!

Have you seen The Life Aquatic?

You've probably already seen it, but if not, Fellini's La Strada is fabulous. Or his Nights of Cabiria. These are two of my all-time faves. For more recent and American, Juno. I rented it last night--and loved it.

Ed Wood!

http://www.speechlessthemagazine.org...e%20movies.htm

I second Sam's Topsy Turvy and will add only four others off the cuff:

I Confess (early Hitchcock) Of course there's a murder, but nothing to flinch at here. Monty Clift is superb and so is the script.

Double Indemnity, 1944. Fred MacMurray's acting is not top flight, but Barbara Stanwyck more than makes up for it. Of course there's a murder but again, it's barely there.

DeSica's Miracle in Milan
Bresson's Au Hasard Balthasar

Aguirre: The Wrath of God

Gail, the odd comedy, Idiocracy, starring Luke Wilson, is worth watching for its premise alone.

Bits from an LA Times review:

Idiocracy" is a vision of an American future bespoiled by rapacious corporations and so dumbed-down by junk culture.

The movie begins with a comparison of two family trees. A high-IQ couple waits for the perfect time to have a child, a decision they don't take lightly, while elsewhere, in the trailer park, the dim bulbs breed like rabbits. The high-IQ couple waits too long, the husband dies of stress during fertility treatments, and their line stops there. Meanwhile, the moron population explodes.

Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson), however, is not actually a moron. He's an average, unambitious, essentially lazy guy biding his time in the Army. It's his perfect averageness (that and his dead parents and no siblings or wife) that make him the perfect candidate for an Army experiment in cryogenics. The idea is to freeze the best soldiers for thawing at a later date, when they're really needed. Joe is chosen as the guinea pig, and because the Army can't find a servicewoman to meet the same criteria, they freeze a hooker named Rita (Maya Rudolph) alongside him.

The experiment is meant to last a year, but in that time the base shuts down, is replaced by a Fuddruckers, and Joe and Rita are forgotten for more than 500 years. Meanwhile, humanity devolves to the point where it can't take care of its basic needs, like dealing with garbage or growing crops, and when Joe and Rita find themselves unearthed during the great garbage avalanche of 2505, they discover to their great surprise that they are the smartest people on Earth.

An IQ and aptitude test he takes in prison (non-payment of his hospital bill) gets Joe taken to the White House, where President Camacho, a three-time "Smackdown!" champion and former super porn-star, makes him secretary of the Interior and entrusts him to fix all the problems. But Joe is focused on getting home and enlists his incompetent lawyer and stupid friend, Frito Lexus (Dax Shepard), with leading him, and Rita, to a time machine.

The plot, naturally, is silly and not exactly bound by logic. But it's Judge's gimlet-eyed knack for nightmarish extrapolation that makes "Idiocracy" a cathartic delight.

Withnail and I may well be the funniest film in the English language. Richard E. Grant is brilliant in it.

[This message has been edited by Quincy Lehr (edited August 09, 2008).]

Idiocracy made almost zero money. Apparently the studio dumped it with no advertising at the end of the summer, assuming that the dumbed-down kids in the theaters would be offended by it. Ha! If the shoe ever fit . . .