You can practically smell the pheromones wafting off this kaleidoscopic odyssey, which finds director Gregg Araki crossing soap-operatic elements with blasts of science fiction, indie-kid cool, and shiny pop-art subversion. On the day when the world is foretold to end, a group of terminally horny, disillusioned, zonked-out teens in Los Angeles see their lives explode in a glitter bomb of drugs, sex, death, and alien abduction. Bisexual lust, vaporizing Valley girls, sinister televangelists, nipple-ring S&M, murder by Campbell’s-soup can—Araki folds…

Gregg Araki takes a road trip to hell in this wild, meth- and fast-food-fueled joyride through the margins of a menacing American wasteland. When they inadvertently link up with a dangerously alluring drifter (Johnathon Schaech), a chilled-out Cali bro (James Duval) and his spiky, foulmouthed girlfriend (Rose McGowan) find themselves on an increasingly violent, kinky, and darkly comic journey in which erotic tensions rise along with the body count. Working with a significant budget for the first time, Araki employs…

A delirious mix of punk nihilism and deadpan irony, the first film in Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy puts an audaciously queer spin on Jean-Luc Godard’s classic Masculin féminin. Across fifteen jagged episodes, Totally F***ed Up plunges headlong into the lives of a group of queer, disaffected Los Angeles teenagers who form a kind of makeshift family as they navigate desire and heartbreak, societal and familial rejection, and the alienation of growing up gay in an era of relentless moralizing.…

As disturbingly funny as it is audaciously empathetic, auteur of unease Todd Solondz’s portrait of damaged souls reaching out for connection reveals the existential void underneath middle-class suburban “normalcy.” An extraordinary ensemble cast—including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jane Adams, Lara Flynn Boyle, Ben Gazzara, and Dylan Baker—embodies an array of loosely connected New Jersey deviants, depressives, and misfits, among them a frustrated phone-sex pest, an all-American dad concealing his pedophilic urges, and a lonely woman with a grisly secret, all of…