Lunacy

Hailed by the Village Voice as "the last true surrealist," Czech master Jan Svankmajer is in peak form in Lunacy, an alarmingly odd treatment of insanity, inspired by the Marquis de Sade and Edgar Allen Poe. Shot in Svankmajer's signature style, which combines live action and stop-motion animation and intertwines sex and violence, Lunacy is set in 19th-century France and focuses on a young man plagued by nightmares of madness. Svankmajer appears as himself in a prologue to introduce the "philosophical horror film," in which cavorting, copulating slabs of raw meat are interspersed with hysteria-based exercises in "art therapy." (35mm, 118 mins.)