A caustically funny cosmic joke of a film about an insecure actor who finds a miracle cure for his facial disfigurement, only to be upstaged by a stranger who oozes self-confidence despite (still) having the exact same condition the main character had once allowed to hold him back, Aaron Schimberg’s ruthless and Escher-like “A Different Man” might have felt cruel if not for how cleverly it complicates its punchline.

Are we supposed to be laughing at someone — someone who’s been treated like a monster for his entire adult life — just because they couldn’t resist the opportunity to shed their skin? Anyone familiar with Schimberg’s “Chained for Life,” which similarly defenestrated the notion of disabilities as “God’s mistakes,” already knows the answer to that question. Besides, who among us would pass up the chance to look like Sebastian Stan?

In that light, it’s more tempting to interpret “A Different Man” as a dark and damning satire of our social conditioning, which has convinced us to see asymmetry as ugliness, and internalize ugliness as inhuman. But while that might be a more accurate distillation of what Schimberg is doing here, leaving it there would fail to convey the full ambition of a deliriously surreal psycho-thriller that complicates its own identity at every turn. By refracting Brian De Palma’s self-reflexiveness and the Coen brothers’ mordant fatalism through the prism of his most personal obsessions, Schimberg creates a house of mirrors so brilliant and complex that it becomes impossible to match any of his characters to their own reflections, and absolutely useless to reduce the movie around them to the stuff of moral instruction.

If “A Different Man” starts by preying upon the same kind of pity that backstopped the likes of “Wonder,” “Freaks,” “The Elephant Man,” and any number of other films about how atypical-looking people have feelings too, it almost immediately begins weaponizing that pity against the audience — as an impediment to empathy, rather than a pathway to it. You will feel bad for Edward by the time this movie arrives at its perfect final line, but not for the reasons you think.

The movie’s first scene also makes us feel bad for Edward in similarly unexpected ways. Our concern isn’t focused on his neurofibromatosis (which has caused non-cancerous tumors to grow around the nerve tissue inside his face, swelling it in every direction at once), but rather that Edward’s condition has forced the wannabe actor to take a role in a Kaufman-esque PSA about the protocols of working with disfigured people. After all, the only real precedent for someone like him to succeed in the movies is probably “Under the Skin” breakout Adam Pearson (a dead ringer for Edward), though it’s unclear if that film exists in this film’s alternate-reality New York, a semi-heightened place which feels almost as blithely hellish as the nowhere city in “Beau Is Afraid.” The closest Edward can get to his dreams is performing an exaggerated version of himself in a project written by — and for the benefit of — the same people who make him scared to leave his dilapidated apartment. “Fear is a reaction,” someone insists. “Courage is a choice.”

Another instructive quote is waiting for Edward when he gets back home, as his greasy super reminds him that “All unhappiness in life comes from not accepting what it is” (words of wisdom that he attributes to Lady Gaga). So while Edward is delighted to find that a free-spirited Norwegian beauty named Ingrid (“The Worst Person in the World” star Renate Reinsve) has moved into the apartment next door, his instant crush is tempered by the reality of the situation — a reality that persists even after she invites him inside and intimately squeezes out the blackheads on his nose.

Maybe Ingrid, who has an endless rotation of strange men to choose from, simply doesn’t see Edward as a sexual being. Or maybe she develops feelings for him too, but denies them to herself because he’s not the kind of guy a woman like her “should” want. Or maybe the manic pixie dream girl energy that Edward projects onto her masks the fact that she’s a narcissistic sociopath who has no regard for other people’s feelings? It’s hard to see things clearly under so many layers of social coding, and Umberto Smerilli’s woozy, clarinet-driven score makes hard truths melt away like warm butter sliding off a knife.

It won’t be long before Edward’s face disassembles in similar fashion. A single trip to a De Palma-coded doctor’s office sets him up with an experimental pill that could reverse his condition, and — just a few days later — Mike Marino’s remarkably life-like makeup begins to peel off in clumps of raw flesh, revealing that Sebastian Stan has been hiding beneath Edward’s tumors the whole time.

Unsurprisingly, some things come pretty easy when you look like Captain America’s BFF. Bar bathroom blowjobs from people you’ve just met. A lucrative career in real estate. But “Guy” — as Edward creatively renames himself after faking his own death — can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t right. Why did the guy who used to live across the hall from him hang himself even though he had a hot girlfriend? When an ice cream truck had to drive on the sidewalk in order to squeeze past the ambulance that came to fetch the body, why did the whole scene feel like such a wickedly cutting metaphor for Edward’s entire future? And when Guy discovers that Ingrid has written an off-Broadway play about Edward’s life and eventual suicide, why can’t he stop himself from auditioning?

Some movies unfold in such a fun way that it can be easy for critics to indulge in the second-hand high of relaying their plots, but I promise that I haven’t spoiled anything beyond the basic setup to a film whose pleasures rely less on surprise than the satisfaction of watching something inevitable unravel into just the right shape.

Existential uncertainty lurks in plain view in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up," a time capsule of Mod-era London that, six decades later, looks like one of the signature movies of the 1960s.

Loosely inspired by the exploits of the celebrated British photographer David Bailey — a talented gadfly whose portraits of cultural icons from the Beatles to the Krays made him something like England’s shutterbug laureate — the film stars David Hemmings as Thomas, whose candid (and surreptitious) snaps of two lovers in London's Maryon Park end up being scrutinized for evidence of foul play. The more that Thomas — and the audience — examine the grainy snaps, the more it seems like something terrible has happened; although the details (and the reasoning) remain blurry, we watch in the hope that the off-screen murder (if there was one) will come into literal and figurative focus.

It’s a classic Hitchcockian premise, shot through with illicit tingles of complicity and voyeurism — prowling through the greenery with his camera, Thomas could be a Peeping Tom — curated for its particular social moment with generous helpings of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll (the film includes a jangly concert performance by Jimmy Page’s band the Yardbirds). The atmosphere is one of chilly, free-floating dread; as seen through the lens of master cinematographer Carlo Di Palma, everyday locations become charged with mystery and menace.

For the critics who had anointed Antonioni as a major auteur based on his earlier, more austere Italian films, "Blow-Up's" surprising commercial success and breakthrough as a mainstream conversation piece was a vindication; for skeptics like critic Pauline Kael, the director was less a visionary than an opportunist, smuggling undergraduate pretentiousness into cinemas under cover of Pop Art. “Antonioni’s new mixture of suspense with vagueness and confusion seems to have a kind of numbing fascination,” Kael wrote in the New Yorker.

In 1974, coming off the world-beating success of "The Godfather," Francis Ford Coppola paid homage via the esthetics and plotting of "The Conversation"; in 1981, Coppola’s fellow New Hollywood innovator Brian De Palma — arguably Kael’s favourite American filmmaker — wrote and directed his own spiritual remake, "Blow Out," which melded Antonioni’s reality-versus-illusion themes with homespun political paranoia.

Antonioni would go on to experiment even more wildly through the home stretch of his career, but "Blow-Up" remains his most beguiling and influential feature: a thriller whose excitement is purely and powerfully metaphysical.

“Ever since I first watched Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, I’ve dreamt of telling a paranoid thriller story. Blow Away is that dream made manifest through an incredible collaboration with Nicola,” said Thompson in a statement. “We’ve crafted a neo-noir mystery about obsession and the slippery and subjective nature of the truth. Really, it’s a big love letter to Brian De Palma and Alfred Hitchcock where suspense is the driving force on every page.

“But beyond all of that, Blow Away is the story of a wildlife videographer who may have recorded a murder,” Thompson continued. “We’re arguably living in the most obsessive, post-truth era where regular people are routinely turned into subjects of collective scrutiny. So what happens when you explore those ideas in a place that is entirely removed from that culture? Does something still bleed through? Can a person whose job it is to see patterns really trust their eyes?”

Describing his days as a 20-something singer-songwriter in New York City during the 2000s, Abraham Chang riffs on Wordsworth’s famous dictum about poetry being emotion recollected in tranquility. “I didn’t have that tranquility,” he adds, “so I was just getting my feelings out.”

888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers (Flatiron, May), Chang’s ebullient debut, is anything but tranquil. Praised by Flatiron v-p and editorial director Zachary Wagman for its “infectious energy,” the novel follows Young Wang, a Chinese American coming of age in late-1990s Queens, N.Y., who views the world through his idiosyncratic brand of numerology. A helpful glossary explains the properties of various numbers from one to 888 according to Chinese tradition and/or Young’s personal taste (19, an example of the latter case due to its significance in Stephen King’s oeuvre, stands for “GOOD”).

Young learns to embrace the inherent chaos of the world from his globe-trotting uncle and his gleefully coarse girlfriend. Each chapter begins with a “soundtrack,” and Chang, a first-generation Chinese American who grew up on a “constant diet of Western pop culture,” strews references to films by David Lynch and Brian De Palma throughout, hoping to please the “pop culture geeks who are going to catch every Easter egg.”

[Oliver] Stone spent several weeks in the Latin neighborhoods of Miami, meeting with police officers and criminals, and the atmosphere drove him back into the old habit of snorting cocaine constantly. From there he moved with his wife to Paris, where he wrote the script “in one sitting and completely sober.” By then, he already conceived the film as “a great Caribbean epic, exuberant, glamorous, erotic, full of energy, extravagance and color.”

When the man who was going to direct the film, Sidney Lumet, read the nearly 300 pages Stone had written, he resorted to the always useful argument of “creative differences” to dodge the bullet. Bregman tried to convince him, reminding him how well they had worked together in previous projects in which Pacino had also been involved, such as Serpico or Dog Day Afternoon, but it was no use. Lumet did not want to compromise his prestige by taking part in such nonsense, although he was gracious enough not to express his opinion in public.

Thus, Bregman turned to Brian De Palma, who was having trouble closing some financing deals after the box office failure of one of his most personal films, Blow Out (1981), and was willing, for once, to take on a commissioned film. At this point Robert De Niro had already rejected the role of Tony Montana. Glenn Close, Kim Basinger, Brooke Shields, Sharon Stone and a half-dozen other actresses had been considered for Elvira, the gangster’s lover, and Bregman had resigned himself to offering the role to an “icy and inexperienced” 24-year-old Michelle Pfeiffer.

Filming was a 24-week marathon between November 1982 and May 1983 that began in Los Angeles to then continue in San Diego and Santa Barbara, with a brief and almost clandestine trip to Miami, where some scenes were shot in spite of the fact that the city that had refused to host the film, starting with one of the most famous: the brutal dismemberment of Ángel, Montana’s first partner.

In March, Pacino suffered severe burns on his left hand when he accidentally grabbed the barrel of a gun that had just been fired. While he recovered in the hospital, De Palma took the opportunity to shoot a series of action scenes that did not require his presence. In one of them, the premature explosion of a bomb caused serious injuries to two specialists. However, the most prominent incident, which a Variety article presented as a supreme example of the level of frivolity and delirium that Hollywood productions were reaching at the time, was the damage that Pacino’s nasal passages suffered after inhaling the high quantities of baby laxative and powdered milk that served as cocaine during the filming of the almost continuous narcotic scenes.

Stone contributed, perhaps unintentionally, to the film’s dark legend. As he told the specialized website Creative Screenwriting, he felt trapped on the set, annoyed by the exasperating slowness caused by the constant interruptions, the neurotic perfectionism of a Brian De Palma that was obsessed with countless trivial details and the puzzling insecurity of Pacino, who insisted on repeating takes over and over. When the final scene was being filmed, that orgy of violence that De Palma conceived as an homage to Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), Steven Spielberg paid a courtesy visit to the Santa Barbara set and insisted on lending a hand. De Palma commissioned him to direct the peculiar shot in which the killers first break into Tony Montana’s mansion.

In the end, the film survived various accidents and difficulties and arrived at the theaters on time. It had a notable performance in its first week, although it only grossed half as much as its great rival at the box office, Sudden Impact, the sequel to Dirty Harry directed by Clint Eastwood, another ultraviolent production reviled by the critics.

Scarface finished the season grossing a respectable but ultimately disappointing $45 million in the United States and $20 million worldwide. Profitability would come later, in a way that was unusual at the time: a quick release on VHS and Betamax in the summer of 1984 that made it the most rented film of the year, and the first to exceed 100,000 copies sold in home video format. Critic Gary Arnold described it as a guilty pleasure: you wouldn’t go see it at the daytime screening of a Times Square movie theater, but you are willing to rent it on the sly and enjoy it by yourself in the privacy of your home.

Today, no one seems to have much problem with it. Hollywood Insider considers it one of the ten best gangster films in history, on Quora they place it among the great classics of all time and its role as a great countercultural reference is barely questioned anymore. In Star Tribune, Gary Thompson remembers that some of the Oscar contenders in 1983 were Yentl, The Big Chill and Silkwood, three featherweights, and that the winner, Terms of Endearment, was not much better. The highest-grossing films of the year were Return of the Jedi and Octopussy. To that batch of harmless, almost immediately obsolete movies, Thompson opposes one of the films of the early 1980s that have aged best, Scarface, with its chainsaw slaughter, its giant mounds of cocaine and Pacino’s lost gaze as he insults left and right with a bizarre Cuban accent. It is difficult, for anyone who has seen it, to disagree with such a verdict.

It’s hard to know who to root for, Elliot Ness and his G-men or Al Capone and his henchmen, in this still-thrilling potboiler, in which Brian De Palma evokes the twilight years of the Roaring Twenties, which ended in a hail of bullets; the “sweet and lowdown” sybaritic pleasures of the Prohibition era; and 1930s gangster films like Scarface and Little Caesar (with a coy nod to the Odessa Steps montage of Battleship Potemkin). David Mamet’s script still crackles, Sean Connery, even in formidable company, reminds us why he is a bona fide movie star (and won an Oscar for his trouble), and Ennio Morricone’s score, counterpointed with Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” and the Pagliacci aria “Vesti la Giubba,” gives the film a propulsive energy.

Following CBS' cancellation of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Get To Know Your Rabbit was to be a Hollywood star vehicle for Tom Smothers. De Palma, fresh off the counterculture success of independent films such as Greetings and Hi, Mom!, was hired by Warner Bros. to direct the film. However, De Palma had run afoul of the studio when he suggested a new ending which would see Smothers' tap-dancing magician superstar escape the dual traps of conformity and commodification by appearing to make a bloody mess of a live rabbit on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Smothers became unsure about De Palma's direction, and since the whole project was conceived as a vehicle for the star, De Palma was locked out. Despite the compromised vision, though, what remains in the bulk of the film is a comedy that flows with De Palma's sardonic sense of the absurd, as a continuation of the countercultural indifference on display in Greetings and Hi, Mom!. The film, made in 1971, sat on a shelf until Warner Bros. dumped it into theaters, of ten as part of a double bill, beginning in 1972 and into 1973.

In his commentary at Trailers From Hell, Larry Karaszewski states that at the time Get To Know Your Rabbit was made, "Tommy was one of the hippest people on Planet Earth."

Here's more from Mike Barnes' obituary at The Hollywood Reporter:

The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour ran from February 1967 until April 1969, when the pair were fired after 72 episodes (and with their show in the top 10 and already renewed for a fourth season). Up against NBC powerhouse Bonanza at 9 p.m. on Sunday nights, their program succeeded by attracting younger, hipper, more rebellious viewers — while also launching the careers of Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, Bob Einstein, Mason Williams and many others.

Clean-cut and sporting closely cropped hair in an era of Easy Rider and acid trips, the former folk singers and makers of hit music-comedy records did not look like the kind of guys who would be lightning rods for controversy.

“Their antics turned television upside down, blending slapstick humor with political satire, making them comedic heroes who blazed the trail followed today by satirists such as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee,” Marc Freeman wrote in his introduction to an oral history of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour that was published in November 2017.

“It was the first show to deal with the White House, Congress, war, counterculture, drugs, civil rights,” Dick noted in the piece. “We were the first in and first out. We made comedy for TV relevant and not just escapism. We nailed it.”

Comedian David Steinberg did religious sermons that stirred up controversy. David Frye impersonated President Nixon as a buffoon. Censors killed many skits (including one about censors written by Elaine May) and changed the language in others, though clever references about drugs sometimes got through. Pat Paulsen, one of the show’s regulars, ran for president in 1968 in a spoof of national politics.

CBS also pre-empted one episode with a rerun and yanked performances of Pete Seeger’s anti-Vietnam War song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” (he was allowed to sing it a year later) and Harry Belafonte‘s “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” which featured a video collage of the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

“When we tried something and were told ‘no,’ I wanted to know why,” Tom said. “Why is content controversial, putting in something real, something with meaning? I couldn’t understand why that would be an issue. And when it became one, I became extra stubborn.”

At the time, the Nixon administration had put the FCC on notice to watch for content it deemed inappropriate. After CBS banished the brothers, they filed a lawsuit against the network for breach of contract and copyright infringement. They won a settlement of about $900,000 but never regained their clout.

“Dickie and I always get pissed off when people say we were canceled,” Tom said. “We were fired. Death can come in two ways, natural causes and murder. We were murdered.”

The show won an Emmy for writing after its demise, with Martin, Einstein, Williams, Lorenzo Music and Allan Blye among those sharing the honor. Tom and Dick, meanwhile, were nominated for outstanding variety or musical series but lost out to Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.

At the 2008 Emmys, Martin presented Tom with a special award, and the pair entered the TV Academy Hall of Fame two years later. A 2002 documentary, Smothered, detailed their duel with CBS.