A group of high-society friends are invited to a mansion for dinner and find themselves inexplicably unable to leave, in Luis Buñuel's daring masterpiece The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador). Made just one year after the director's international sensation, Viridiana, this film, full of eerie comic absurdity, continues Buñuel's wicked takedown of the rituals and dependencies of the frivolous upper classes. In his autobiography, My Last Sigh, the impish filmmaker answered viewers seeking a neat explanation for what is surely one of the great surrealist films of all time: "People always want an explanation for everything. And for everything for which they cannot find an explanation, they resort in the last instance to God. What's the use? Eventually they have to explain God."

New York: Sept. 22 at Film Society of Lincoln Center.