A group of high-society friends are invited to a mansion for dinner and inexplicably find themselves unable to leave in Luis Buñuel’s daring masterpiece The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador). Made just one year after his international sensation Viridiana, this film, full of eerie, comic absurdity, furthers Buñuel’s wicked takedown of the rituals and dependencies of the frivolous upper classes.

“This dreamlike fable about the complacency of the wealthy elite is as funny and frightening as any other film in his oeuvre, and features one of his all-time greatest endings.” Rob Christopher, Cine-File

“Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film takes an old Mexican proverb—”After 24 hours, corpses and guests smell bad”—and turns it into a marvelous satire on the life of the bourgeoisie.” Don Druker, Reader

“It’s is one of Buñuel’s most provocative and unforgettable works… Not only does this story undermine our confidence in our social institutions but it challenges our powers of cognition and perception, which are shown to be easily distorted by unreliable narratives. Perhaps most threatening, despite the emotional distance from the characters that Buñuel’s satiric vision grants us, we are ultimately forced to see that we in the audience are also objects of his attack.” Marsha Kinder, Criterion