I’ll fourth Donnie Darko. Great flick.
I’ll raise you The Evil Dead. Crazy and unpredictable, like lots of my dreams. Quirky too.
Pi, though it’s closer to a nightmare than a dream. Especially unnerving is the fact that it is not a horror movie.
Most horror movies will fit the bill. In the Mouth of Madness is a personal favorite, along with all three Evil Dead movies.
As mentioned, Fellini’s Satyricon.
And, a little seen, underappreciated gem by Robert Altman called Images.
Naked Lunch is one of the strangest, dreamiest flicks I’ve seen. It was supposedly based on the Wm. Burroughs book. I read the book later, though, and it had very little in common with the movie.
Dogma had the odd, disjointed feel of a dream.
Good call, I completely forgot about that one. I’ve also heard that the book was much different, but I’ve never been inclined to read it.
I read Naked Lunch before I saw the movie. The movie relied heavily on both the book and the story of Burroughs writing it. It would be impossible to make an actually watchable movie if one wanted it to recongizably follow the book; I thought the movie struck a pretty good balance.
Hijack: If anyone’s interested, the Burroughs biography Literary Outlaw is a good read. For a literary biography, anyway.
I’ll second Mulholland Drive - very freaky.
What about Groundhog Day?
Vanilla Sky or the original (and IMHO better) Spanish version: Abre los Ojos. They’re both fantastic.
And The Manchurian Candidate, to a certain extent.
2001 A Space Odyssey
I just saw Willard (the new one) last night. It wasn’t the greatest movie, but it was very dreamlike. Crispin Glover’s performance is really haunting.
I found Memento to be very dreamlike. I often have disconnected dreams where I struggle to find out exactly what is going on, much like I felt when I first watched that movie.
The Keep (1983)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0085780/
Very surreal. Most folks hate it but you have to admit it has a very dreamlike atmpsphere. (Musical score by “Tangerine Dream”).
Jacob’s Ladder (1990)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0099871/
Plot rambles all over the place. Incoherent at times. It is difficult to figure out anything that is occurring. Still, the reviews are much more positive than what you’ll read about “The Keep”.
Videodrome (1983)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0086541/
Very strange and very gory. Still, it is dreamlike - more like nightmarish actually.
Many of the movies that I would have recommended have already been mentioned. However, I would recommend Kafka. Good cast, good direction and a weird story.
Eraserhead has already been mentioned, but many viewers fail to realize that the whole movie is a dream sequence.
One movie that hasn’t been mentioned and deserves to be is the original Nightmare on Elm Street. The endless sequels have obscured the fact that the first movie was actually pretty good.
Phillip Ridley’s The Reflecting Skin
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, The Holy Mountain and Santa Sangre
Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Tetsuo 2: Body Hammer
Werner Herzog’s Aguirre the Wrath of God
The Quay Brothers’ Institute Benjamenta starring Mark Rylance and Alice Krige is amazingly strange and beautiful, the story of a man trying to lose his personality in the eternal repetition of life in a school for servants. However, when I saw it in the cinema the effect was lessened by many bored audience members fiddling noisily with their chairs.
As well as Jodorowsky, Bergman, Cocteau, David Lynch, and David Cronenberg already mentioned, many of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky are truly dreamlike: The Sacrifice, the original Solaris, his masterpiece Andrei Rublev, the utterly incomprehensible Nostalgia, and others.
Also: Emel Klimov’s Come And See, a dark, poetic, and visually spectacular Belorussian war film which alternates horror with farce and makes Apocalypse Now look like a recruiting advert filmed on a camcorder by a total amateur.
Mike Leigh’s Naked has the quality of a nightmare and is fiercely apocalyptic.
Mizoguchi’s Sansho Dayu (Sansho the Bailiff) is a fable set in medieval Japan with something of the same doomy feel of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, which is another film I can’t believe nobody mentioned.
I can’t believe no one’s mentioned The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the original “dream movie.”
The original City of Angels is very dreamlike, its amazing…
Night of the Hunter qualifies, I think, particularly for the sequence when the children are fleeing downriver from Robert Mitchum’s evil preacher.
A few more:
Hitchcock’s Vertigo
Polanski’s Le Locataire (The Tenant)
Just saw the recent Lost in Translation, and that certainly has dreamlike qualities to it.
The Virgin Suicides
Forboding, haunting, beautiful in its way.
Some good choices (I’ll second The Tenant, one of the best horror films ever made, especially if you’ve seen Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby*).
I’d like to add Louis Malle’s Black Moon. No story, and practically no dialogue, but filled entirely by strange, dreamlike imagery that’s fascinating to watch. The final image is unforgettable.
Malle had the ability to make fascinating (and oddly warmhearted) movies out of the most unlikely of concepts (Nazi collaborators, incest, child prostitution, etc.)
*The movie assumes you have, to marvelous effect.