Viridiana

Luis Buñuel returned to Spain after decades of exile to make Viridiana in 1961, and the result became one of cinema's great scandals. It shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes, whereupon the Franco regime — which had hoped the prodigal's homecoming would burnish its international image — banned the film outright and dismissed the officials who had approved it, while the Vatican newspaper condemned it as blasphemous.

Silvia Pinal plays the devout would-be saint whose Christian charity curdles into something darker, with the great Fernando Rey as the uncle whose estate she visits. Buñuel marshals his lifelong arsenal of irony and provocation — fetish, dream, sacrilege, the cruelty hidden in piety — toward a withering examination of religious idealism, building to a celebrated dinner-table tableau in which a band of beggars arrange themselves into a grotesque parody of Leonardo's Last Supper, scored to the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah.

The controversy only sealed the film's reputation, and it remains among the most pointed works of the Spanish-Mexican master, the moment his surrealist instincts and his anticlerical fury fused most perfectly. Savage, mordantly funny and utterly unrepentant, Viridiana is Buñuel's definitive assault on the comforts of faith and good intentions — a film that bit the hand of every institution, sacred and political, that had tried to claim it for its own.