Broadly speaking there are two categories of movies which roughly correspond to two types of audience. Firstly there are mainstream movies geared towards entertainment - largely appealing to the masses, these are normally told through a conventional narrative format with a three act structure, with easy to recognise characters who follow a formulaic arc, often within a readily identifiable genre. The second category can be summed up as cinema as "art". These are the more experimental films screened primarily in art house cinemas and at international film festivals which seek to push the boundaries of the medium. Aesthetically and thematically, these movies are less interested in box office returns on investments than they are with delivering a unique message or vision - often intensely personal to the director - discarding the conventions of mainstream cinema in favour of abstraction, allegory and layered symbolism. The corresponding audiences to these two approaches to filmmaking - as with video gamers - can be divided roughly into the casual viewer and the hardcore film buff; with the true cinephiles making up the latter. While some mainstream films emerge which play with and subvert the conventions of cinema, the really challenging movies tend to come from the avante garde. The following are ten great movies for the hardcore film buff after something to really get their mental gears working. If you struggled to get your head around Inception these might not be the films you're looking for.
