50 Greatest WTF Movies

The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr T (1953)

The WTF Movie: Dr Seuss wrote this kids' nightmare about a boy forced to join 499 other children at the keys of a mad teacher's giant piano.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: The Elevator Song , sung by an operator dressed as an executioner who offers such delights as "assorted simple tortures, molten lead, chopping blocks and hot boiling oil."

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

The WTF Movie: This Palme D'Or winner from Apichatpong Weerasethakul wove Thai folk-tales through laidback art-house stylings to conjure up a hallucinatory, supernatural world.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: A princess has sex with a talking catfish.

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

The WTF Movie: Richard Linklater uses image-scrambling rotoscope animation to visualise the mind-bending concept of Philip K. Dick's novel about an undercover narc (Keanu Reeves) succumbing to the effects of new drug Substance D.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: Reeves dons the "scramble suit," a form of identity protection that continually morphs and blurs his features.

Synecdoche, New York (2009)

The WTF Movie: Frustrated theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) embarks on his greatest venture - an ongoing recreation of the entire city of New York in a huge warehouse populated by a cast of thousands.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: The 'play' reaches the point where Caden created the play, forcing him to cast long-term stalker Sammy (Tom Noonan) as 'Caden' in the 'play within a play.'

The City Of Lost Children (1995)

The WTF Movie: Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro make their debut, Delicatessen , look like neo-realism with the tale of a child-stealing scientist aided by multi-cloned Dominique Pinon an a talking brain in a jar.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: The opening dream sequence, in which a boy's house is invaded by dozens of Santa Clauses.

Stalker (1979)

The WTF Movie: Andrei Tarkovsky's rain-soaked sci-fi movie sees the titular guide lead two men on an illegal journey into the Zone, where their innermost desires will be met.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: The men find the Room at the centre of the Zone… and change their minds about going in.

Naked Lunch (1991)

The WTF Movie: David Cronenberg gets the mugwump jism up in every verse, as he adapts William S. Burroughs' notorious tale of a drug-addicted writer's adventures in the Interzone.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: Writer William Lee (Peter Weller) discovers that his typewriter has transformed into a bug and started talking to him.

Altered States (1980)

The WTF Movie: Ken Russell, no stranger to WTF-ery, embroils William Hurt in bizarre experiments with sensory deprivation and psychotropic drugs that leave him, shall we say, changed.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: Hurt is crucified while wearing the head of a seven-eyed goat.

Repulsion (1965)

The WTF Movie: Catherine Deneuve goes crazy in a London flat in Roman Polanski's poison-pen letter to the Swinging Sixties.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: Deneuve is attacked by arms breaking through the walls of the flat.

Pi (1998)

The WTF Movie: Darren Aronofsky's debut steals back the blueprint for the indie career debut from Tarantino by going the other way: the lo-fi, B&W weirdness of a mathematician hounded by a Jewish cult.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: Tortured genius Max (Sean Gullette) realises there's only one way of numbing the pain, and reaches for a power drill.