Europa

"You will now listen to my voice...On the count of ten you will be in Europa..." So begins Max von Sydow's opening narration to Lars von Trier's hypnotic Europa (known in the U.S. as Zentropa), a fever dream in which American pacifist Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr) stumbles into a job as a sleeping-car conductor for the Zentropa railways in a Kafkaesque 1945 postwar Frankfurt. With its gorgeous black-and-white and color imagery and meticulously recreated (if then nightmarishly deconstructed) costumes and sets, Europa is one of the great Danish filmmaker's weirdest and most wonderful works, a runaway train ride to an oddly futuristic past.