Being John Malkovich (1999)

It starts off strange, but the head-tilting oddity of this film builds to such a weirdly comic expanse that I don't even know where to begin. In part, it's about a door that shunts you into the conscious mind of actor John Malkovich for fifteen minutes before spitting you out on the side of the road across town. But there's so much more going on here! It's about lust, it's about puppets, it's about fear of death. Charlie Kaufman's writing here is hysterically funny, off-kilter in such uniquely surreal ways, and yet the whole thing makes a warped kind of sense within its own little world. Just as peculiar are the performers, especially an extremely gracious and self-deprecating John Malkovich as himself. To say much more, even in such a short form, would probably spoil too much. Suffice it to say that this movie manages to be a true original, hilarious and bizarre like nothing else before or since. For better or worse, there truly is nothing else like it in all of cinema.

9 out of 10.