Tim Dirks's 100+ Most Controversial Films of All-Time

They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time.

The Birth of A Nation is a silent film from 1915 and the highest grossing film in film history. The film tells a romance story during the American civil war.

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí present 16 minutes of bizarre, surreal imagery.

The film consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most sustained of which details the story of a man and a woman who are passionately in love. Their attempts to consummate their passion are constantly thwarted, by their families, by the Church and bourgeois society in general.

A young soldier faces profound disillusionment in the soul-destroying horror of World War I. Together with several other young German soldiers, he experiences the horrors of war, such evil of which he had not conceived of when signing up to fight. They eventually become sad, tormented, and confused of their purpose.

A circus' beautiful trapeze artist agrees to marry the leader of side-show performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him for his inheritance.

Scarface is a brutal gangster film from 1932 from director Howard Hawks that depicts the fall of a Chicago gangster.

Eva has just gotten married to an older gentleman, but discovers that he is obsessed with order in his life and doesn't have much room for passion. She becomes despondent and leaves him, returning to her father's house. One day while bathing in the lake, she meets a young man and they fall in love. The husband has become grief stricken at the lo...

The infamous propaganda film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Germany

Jennie is a twelve-year-old girl living with her parents in extremely rural mountain country. Her schoolteacher, Miss Carol, though a mountain girl herself, has gone off to be educated and returned in hopes of stopping the tradition of child marriage which permeates the culture. Jennie's father Ira is a good man who tries to protect Miss Carol f...

Orson Wells was 26 when he made his first feature film Citizen Kane. The film became known as one of the greatest of all time and earned him international celebrity. The story is about the publishing business and how one thrill-seeker’s struggle for power negatively affected everybody he came in contact with and eventually lead to a merciless war.

Western legends Pat Garrett, Doc Holliday and Billy the Kid are played against each other over the law and the attentions of vivacious country vixen Rio McDonald.

Uncle Remus draws upon his tales of Brer Rabbit to help little Johnny deal his confusion over his parents' separation as well as his new life on the plantation.

In the first episode, a heartbroken woman talks to her ex-lover on the phone. In the second, a pregnant woman believes she is carrying the child of Saint Joseph.

Two aging playboys are both after the same attractive young woman, but she fends them off by claiming that she plans to remain a virgin until her wedding night. Both men determine to find a way around her objections.

Archie Lee Meighan is a failing cotton gin owner who is married to Baby Doll, a 19-year old childlike beauty whose father arranged the marriage for financial reasons. As Archie awaits the arrival of Baby Doll's 20th birthday, the day that they are supposed to consummate their marriage, he faces interference from business rival Silva Vacarro, who...

A young man murders women, using a movie camera to film their dying expressions of terror.

Psycho is one of the most famous masterpieces from Hitchcock and for it’s time was unparalleled in it’s horror effect. A chilling score sets the pace for an introverted killer and a mystery thriller case of multiple dimensions. The credits for the film directed by Saul Bass were revolutionary for their time.

A closeted lawyer risks his career to bring a blackmailer to justice.

Viridiana, a young nun about to take her final vows, pays a visit to her widowed uncle at the request of her Mother Superior.

Lolita is the controversial film based of the novel of the same name from Nabokov. Stanley Kubrick filmed the literature professor Humbert Humbert having an affair with a13-year-old girl named Lolita. Even though Kubrick left out the explicit details from the novel, the film was received in the U.S.A. with much protest.

A documentary consisting of a series of travelogue vignettes providing glimpses into cultural practices throughout the world intended to shock or surprise, including an insect banquet and a memorable look at a practicing South Pacific cargo cult.

In the sleepy suburbs of Miami, seemingly normal Egyptian immigrant Fuad Ramses runs a successful catering business. He also murders young women and plans to use their body parts to revive the goddess Ishtar. The insane Ramses hypnotizes a socialite in order to land a job catering a party for her debutante daughter, Suzette Fremont, and turns th...

Bonnie and Clyde is based on the true stories of the gangster pair Bonnie Parker and Clyde Parker who in the 1930’s began robbing banks in all the main US cities until they were eventually killed. The film takes on the aesthetical movement of New Hollywood.

Lena, aged twenty, wants to know all she can about life and reality. She collects information on everyone and everything, storing her findings in an enormous archive. She experiments with relationships, political activism, and meditation. Meanwhile, the actors, director and crew are shown in a humorous parallel plot about the making of the film ...

The film is a stark and graphic portrayal of the conditions that existed at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts. TITICUT FOLLIES documents the various ways the inmates are treated by the guards, social workers and psychiatrists.

Rosemary’s Baby is a classic physiological horror film from Roman Polanski about a young couple who move into a New York apartment to start a family and have a baby. Things soon turn ugly as Rosemary believes her baby isn’t safe around their strange neighbors.

A naive male prostitute and his sickly friend struggle to survive on the streets of New York City.

The Wild Bunch is one of the best representations of the Western genre; A group of outlaws is in battle with the law and with modern society.

The film traces the sexual and emotional confusion of two men from their Amherst College days in the fifties through the Kennedy sixties, up to the Vietnam era.

In a near-future Britain, young Alexander DeLarge and his pals get their kicks beating and raping anyone they please. When not destroying the lives of others, Alex swoons to the music of Beethoven. The state, eager to crack down on juvenile crime, gives an incarcerated Alex the option to undergo an invasive procedure that'll rob him of all perso...

In 17th-century France, Father Urbain Grandier's protection of the city of Loudun from the corrupt Cardinal Richelieu is undermined by a sexually repressed nun's accusation of witchcraft.

Dirty Harry is an American police thriller from director Don Siegel and starring Clint Eastwood as a rebellious police officer who is hunting down a serial murderer. The film was one of the most successful films of the 1970’s and spawned numerous films with the Dirty Harry figure.

The coming of age of a youth named Sonny in a small Texas town in the 1950s.

Straw Dogs is an American thriller from director Sam Peckinpah from 1971. Dustin Hoffman stars as a mathematician who faces a ruthless revenge of pressing power.

After saving a Black Panther from some racist cops, a black male prostitute goes on the run from "the man" with the help of the ghetto community and some disillusioned Hells Angels.

Linda's frustration with her inability to achieve orgasm causes a friend to recommend that she see a sex therapist about her problem. During the exam the therapist discovers that Linda's clitoris is located in her throat and recommends deep throating as a treatment to her ailment. Linda then goes on to experiment with this new technique as she s...

Mari and Phyllis go to the "big city" to see their favorite band BloodLust. Along the way they meet up with newly escaped convict Krug and his gang.

A young Parisian woman begins a sordid affair with a middle-aged American businessman whom lays out ground rules that their clandestine relationship will be based only on sex.

John Water’s goal with the almost entirely self created film Pink Flamingo was to film the lousiest trash film of all times. And he was successful as Pink Flamingos would become a cult film.

Something beyond comprehension is happening to a little girl on this street, in this house. A man has been called for as a last resort to try and save her. That man is The Exorcist.

A young woman, muted after a sexual assault as a child, is trained to seek violent revenge on those who have wronged her after being kidnapped and forced to work as a prostitute.

A group of friends passing through are stalked and hunted down by a deformed killer with a chainsaw in order to sustain his poor family who can only afford to eat what they kill.

Ilsa is a warden at a Nazi death camp that conducts experiments on prisoners. Ilsa's goal is to prove that woman can withstand more pain and suffering than men and should be allowed to fight on the front lines

Four corrupted fascist libertines round up 9 teenage boys and girls and subject them to 120 days of sadistic physical, mental and sexual torture.

In the Theatre of the Macabre in New York, Sardu and his assistants present a show involving the torture and mutilation of young women. The audience assumes it is just an act, but the torture is real, as are the deaths.

A fictionalized retelling of the story of Sada Abe, whose affair with her master quickly turned obsessive and sadomasochistic.

Handsomely-mounted historical epic concerns the birth of the Islamic faith and the story of the prophet Mohammed.

Reluctantly, a sulky adolescent returns to her parents' house for yet another boring summer vacation, dabbling in desire and the art of desirability, eventually mixing reality with vision, caged fantasies with the fierce female sexuality.

A so-called "snuff" movie involving the exploits of a cult leader leading a gang of bikers in a series of supposedly real killings on film.