What’s a movie you enjoyed, but never want to see again?

I can watch a shootout or surgery play out on screen without batting an eye, but there’s something about hand-to-hand combat, self-harm, and watching socially awkward people that makes me uncomfortable to the point of displeasure. Todd Phillips’ happens to subject viewers to all three. Just conjuring memories of Joaquin Phoenix’s bony back is enough to make me physically recoil. Cinematographer Lawrence Sher beautifully shot Phoenix’s engrossing Arthur Fleck, but the world they created is not one I want to spend time in ever again. [Patrick Gomez]

John Waters may consider it —of course he does, he’s John Waters—but once was enough for me and Salò, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Marquis de Sade-inspired 1976 wallow through the extremes of human cruelty has some pretty provocative (and resonant) points to make about the innate corruption of the carceral state and the psychological underpinnings of fascism. But watching the movie more than once, at least in my mind, is like burning yourself on a stove every morning to remind yourself that fire is hot. You’ve got to hand it to Pasolini, though—forcing them to sit through multiple scenes where weeping teenagers are forced to eat human feces is one way to create a Pavlovian aversion to fascism in an audience. [Katie Rife]

I know this is blasphemy, but I have no desire to sit through Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey ever again. Glad to have seen it, I know it’s a masterpiece, but life is short, and I just don’t have another two-and-a-half hours to give up. Fortunately for me, by the time I had seen it, enough had been written about 2001 to (kind of) help me understand the monolith and the star baby and the prospective danger of technology that the film was intended to transmit. But honestly, at the time, especially before the whole HAL/Dave showdown kicked in, I found it to be a ponderous snooze. I’ll go clean out my desk. [Gwen Ihnat]

There’s something about seeing children really go through it—children, then adolescents, and then young adults. Barry Jenkins’ shows viewers all three, tracing the life of its central character, Chiron, as he begins the film as a shy, sensitive boy before hardening into a tough, closed-off young man. When I saw it in the theater in 2016, the film created such an ache in me that I didn’t want to talk to the friend I’d come with after it was over. It was almost too much to take. The fear in rewatching the film is both that it’ll make me feel that way again and that it won’t. [Laura Adamczyk]

My eyes welled with tears just watching the trailer to , so I knew well enough to make it a solo screening when Gus Van Sant’s 2003 indie rolled into my local theater. Based in part on the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, the Palme D’Or winner is a spare and emotionally distant look at a school shooting that elides narrative in order to emphasize the banality of the tragedy. And while the shooting itself is painful to watch, it comprises only a small fraction of the running time, with Van Sant devoting the bulk of the film to ordinary interactions between its cast of archetypes. And that’s really what gets me—the horror of knowing that this normalcy will so abruptly pivot to violence. “Is something bad?” a character asks a teary John Robinson in the trailer. “I don’t know,” he says, a reply that teases the invisible wire of unease that grows tauter with every one of these kinds of tragedies. Elephant is the only movie I’ve seen that propelled me to call my mom and tell her I loved her afterward.[Randall Colburn]