15 Minutes

The lure of fame, fame, fatal fame does terrible things to the characters in this series: cracked individuals who will do anything to claw their way into the spotlight, or back into it, from the aging divas of Sunset Boulevard and Veronika Voss to the reality-challenged, celebrity-fixated, sociopaths of The Bling Ring and The King of Comedy. Taking its title from Andy Warhol’s much-repeated prophecy, 15 Minutes brings together films—from David Lynch, Andrzej Żuławski, Ingmar Bergman, and other titans of world cinema—whose starstruck protagonists are led by something like the dictum of Robert De Niro’s delusional would-be standup Rupert Pupkin: “Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime!”