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Between 1964 and 1981, Oldřich Lipský and Jiří Brdečka collaborated on a loose trilogy of films, each of which paid loving, yet subversive, homage to a strain of pop culture that would’ve been seen as hopelessly disreputable by the Communist authorities in the former Czechoslovakia. Lemonade Joe is a tribute to the John Ford western, while Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet tinkers with the conventions of the private eye film. And Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians delivers a hilarious and surreal steampunk riff on a lesser known Jules Verne novel, in which the French writer filters the trappings of gothic fiction through his “scientific-technical” worldview.

The comedic sensibility behind Mysterious Castle bears comparison to a number of other films and filmmakers. Its sense of anarchy and unpredictability brings to mind the work of the Marx Brothers, while the delight that it takes in in absurdism and abstruse wordplay (only some...

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Kviff) on Monday added a David Lynch short and an episode of his iconic series Twin Peaks to its Franz Kafka retrospective and unveiled the program of its Out of the Past section, featuring classic, cult, rare and “unfairly overlooked” films, screened in their original or restored versions.

Among the highlights are restored versions of Wim Wenders’ 1984 neo-Western drama Paris, Texas and Two English Girls, François Truffaut’s 1971 period drama about a love triangle.

The Wenders film is part of a three-film program presented by Alexandre O. Philippe, the creator of documentary essays about the history of cinema, offering perspectives on the American landscape in cinema. He will also present his 2021 documentary The Taking (2021), which explores American mythology through the socio-philosophical dimensions of the American landscape.

Also part of the Out of the Past program is Let’s Get Lost, Bruce Weber’s documentary about...

Acid Westerns are a strange and surreal sub-genre that break the rules of the traditional Western, offering complex characters and narrative experimentation. Films like Lemonade Joe, High Plains Drifter, and Blueberry showcase the trippier side of Acid Westerns, featuring bizarre stories, ghostly protagonists, and drug-induced trips. Directors like Jim Jarmusch, Richard Stanley, and Alejandro Jodorowsky pushed the boundaries of Acid Westerns, creating metaphysical trips, genre mashups, and hallucinatory visions.

While many viewers might think of the Western as a pretty straightforward genre, some of its trippiest outings prove that the opposite is true. The Western has been around for a long time. Back in the early days of film, B-Westerns defined the tropes and traditions that would go on to define the genre before the Golden Age of Westerns saw directors like John Ford distill these conventions into a fine art. After that, the Spaghetti Westerns of the '60s...

Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan, revolutionized storytelling by narrating its entire plot in reverse order, earning critical acclaim and Oscars. However, several movies before Memento, such as Happy End, Betrayal, and 2 Friends, had already perfected the art of reverse storytelling, showcasing the changing notions of love, friendship, and growing up. Peppermint Candy, released just a year before Memento, used reverse chronology to tell an epic tale of a man's life and serve as a metaphorical documentation of a changing South Korea.

Christopher Nolan’s breakout hit Memento felt groundbreaking in its time for narrating its entire storyline in reverse order, taking first-time viewers by surprise. Based on the short story Memento Mori by his brother Jonathan Nolan, the 2000 psychological thriller followed the disturbed life of Guy Pearce’s Leonard Shelby, an insurance investigator with short-term memory loss. Clinging on to the fragments of his memory through Polaroid photographs and tattoos,...

My favorite cult movie story goes like this: One Saturday evening in 1982 in the UK, the start of the BBC's football show "Match of the Day" was delayed, causing some impatient viewers to flip over to the other two channels to kill some time. Some landing on BBC 2 found themselves drawn into a wacky time travel farce from Czechoslovakia involving identical twins, suitcase nukes, and Hitler's bunker called "Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea." Oldrich Lipsky's nutty film never received a theatrical release in the UK and only aired that one time on terrestrial TV, creating an unlikely following among a small group of bewildered footy fans.

Almost anything has the potential to become a cult film if it strikes a chord with the right audience. "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" was a midnight movie staple almost from the get-go, with fans attending screenings...

Czech cinema that which isn't closely connected to the New Wave often seems to inhabit a hermetically sealed bubble adrift from real-world concerns, devoted to stylistic excess for its own sake, pleasing to the eye and ear but starving the mind: a result, no doubt, of stringent state censorship. Many filmmakers chose to escape the problem of having every promising subject matter or approach barred to them by fleeing into the past, and into fantasy, with the result that the Czech's, following the example of former animator Karel Zeman, led the world in adaptations of Jules Verne novels nobody else could be bothered filming.

So to Oldrich Lipský's The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians (1981), a handsomely-mounted, occasionally amusing, visually inventive and completely pointless film, which at least partially overcomes its state-enforced toothlessness by sheer invention.