12 Movies That Aren't As Pretentious As You Think

8. Mulholland Drive

David Lynch is a magnet for accusations of cinematic pretension, and if you're not used to the filmmaker's brand of surreal weirdness, you can kinda understand why.

His magnum opus is unquestionably Mulholland Drive, a mind-bending film noir which questions both its characters' and the audience's perception of events, as leads Naomi Watts and Laura Harring end up playing two characters a-piece across two realities.

But Lynch's hook is really quite simple if you break it down. This is a movie of two halves in which two distinct scenarios - popularly accepted to be a dream and the brutal reality that follows - are juxtaposed to heartbreaking effect.

It is unquestionably a movie that benefits from multiple viewings to parse every subtle morsel of information on display, but just because Lynch's film isn't strictly tethered to a defined logic doesn't mean it's looking down on the viewer or presenting itself as anything more than what it is.

It is simply a collision of images and scenes, and the viewer is free to make sense of it or simply enjoy the film as a logic-divorced mood piece.