Depending on how you view it even today, Luis Bunuel’s first feature length film is either a profound meditation on the absurdity of religion, ritual, and social standards, or a total prank that even his friend, and co-collaborator Salvador Dali refused to acknowledge as anything else. It’s probably both, I’ve seen it so many times that every new viewing brings me to a different conclusion about its ultimate worth in the history of the cinema, but one thing I never fail to grasp is that Bunuel, using images and editing for alternating shock and symbolic value, is a master provocateur, and any film that starts with a scorpion, ends with Jesus leaving the scene of a de Sadian orgy, and in between runs the gamut of religious and social anarchy for a tight 60 minutes of often incomprehensible mayhem, is worth the discussion.