El Topo

Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky

1970 / 125min / 35mm

Chilean-born mime-turned-filmmaker Jodorowsky plays the title role in this acid Western staple of the midnight movies, strapping on the six-shooter as a lone gunfighter—his name means “The Mole” in Spanish—traveling across a psychedelic desert landscape on a quest to vanquish increasingly unusual villains while simultaneously confronting his own spiritual anguish and existential dread. A mind-melting trip through the doors of perception that counted John Lennon among its many acolytes, made up of “a phantasmagoric Mexican landscape laden with dead bunnies and burros, snarling hippie chicks, pregnant silences, buckets of blood, and guru-gunslingers.”—Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

Part of Animal Farm: Moles