2 Best Movies to Watch by Jan Švankmajer

With many iterations of Faust, Jan Švankmajer’s own take on the deal with the devil isn't absolutely terrifying, and can feel bizarre, sometimes even goofy, to those unfamiliar with the animation director. However, Lekce Faust is quite creepy, as he brings the legend to modern day Prague with a mysterious map and visually disturbing puppets that brilliantly mixes live action with stop-motion and claymation into folklorish cinematic magic. It's not the most faithful rendition of the classic tale, but it's one of the most inventive, proving that while the deals like this pop up only in past folklore, the devil still lingers in fairly absurd ways.

Genre: Animation, Drama, Fantasy

Actor: Antonín Zacpal, Jan Kraus, Jiří Suchý, Petr Čepek, Petr Meissel, Vladimír Kudla

Director: Jan Švankmajer

While Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is widely considered a classic, there’s just something inscrutable, mysterious, and even a bit weird about the tale. Czech director Jan Svankmajer's version takes a distinctly unsettling approach, with everything but normal-sized Alice animated into creepy stop-motion, including, but not limited to, cards, puppets falling apart, and actual dead animals, and with every dialogue coming literally from Alice’s mouth, but it’s through this approach that makes the fantastical novel more like a strange dream rather than the Disney-fied fairy tale we’ve come to know. Něco z Alenky is a refreshing take that finally acknowledges the dark side of Alice in Wonderland.

Genre: Adventure, Animation, Fantasy

Actor: Kristýna Kohoutová

Director: Jan Švankmajer