Welcome to the Weekly Movie Thread, your place on the Avocado to discuss films with your fellow commenters. Want to make a recommendation? Looking for recommendations? Want to share your opinions of movies, both new and classic?

In between the mid-1990’s to roughly the mid-2010’s, there was a movement in Europe that gained quite a bit of attention in the States. Or, at least, internet message boards in the States. Typically, only artsy types care about what Europeans films are trending. This time was different, though.

This time, the movies were violent.

The movies were dubbed the “New Extremism” by critics. They featured some memorably screwed up imagery that tended to stick with viewers. Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible features a man’s head getting bashed in by a fire extinguisher. Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist featured a talking fox. Also, genital mutilation. Tom Six would memorably direct a film where a mad scientist sewed a person’s behind to another person’s mouth. And A Serbian Film… well, I can’t recount what goes on in that movie without the risk of permanently damaging my sanity.

Even Claire Denis got into it. Last year, Denis’ Beau travail was ranked as the seventh best movie of all time by Sight and Sound. She also directed 2001’s Trouble Every Day, in which a woman has sex with men and then bites them to death.

The images are so extreme that they provoke some of the most disgusted reactions. For example, Roger Ebert called Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny the worst film ever at the Cannes Film Festival. (Ebert later recanted this assessment, though not before Gallo very classily called Ebert a fat pig and a slave trader.). That’s at the core of the appeal for these types of films, though. They provoke a very strong reaction.

The “New Extremism” is hardly the only movie subgenre that revels in ultra violence. However, what separates these films from 80’s slasher films is that, for the most part, the movies look incredibly good.

Take Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, for example. That movie has stunning imagery from the beginning. When Oscar takes a DMT, we’re introduced to some trippy imagery that effectively does chill me out without even taking drugs. There are scenes of Oscar walking the city streets of Tokyo, and the lights move in waves as if the city was lit up in a circular pattern.

You just have realize at some point, there’s going to be a close-up of a bloody aborted fetus.

It’s probably this combination of artistic imagery and extreme profanity that attracts directors like Claire Denis to these sorts of projects in the first place.

Today’s bonus prompt: Is there any film in the “new extremism” that you like?