FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

gavin6942 Depicts a dream sequence about the brutal rape and torture of director Kenneth Anger himself (as a teenager) by a group of sailors on the street (after trying to pick one of them up).Anger later said, "This flick is all I have to say about being seventeen, the United States Navy, American Christmas, and the Fourth of July." Holy smokes, guys. This is about as hard-hitting as it comes for the 1940s. The homosexual theme, the intense violence... this is still shocking and revolting in the 2010s... we have have grown soft to violence, but if we have I can only imagine how people in the 40s reacted when they saw this. Terrifying!

anthony-432 This film is one of the seminal works of underground cinema and hugely influential on what was to follow - including Jean Genet's 'Un Chant d'Amour' - hallucinatory, surreal. Sheer unalloyed genius. Beautifully luminous black-and-white photography and razor-sharp editing. Made when Anger was a mere twenty years old (he claimed seventeen ... those three years make all the difference), and shot for a few dollars on the family 16mm camera, it remains one of the founding texts of the underground, looking back to Eisenstein's montage theories and forward to the explosion in avant-garde film-making in the '50s and '60s. The greatest living film-maker.

lynchingsamsa Anger's first film was made over the course of a weekend at his family home. His parents were away. He was Seventeen.The film is a short and immensely effective exploration of sexuality. That the fantasies are of homosexual leaning bears no relevance; it is merely the chosen vehicle for the subject.The film is fascinated with the violence of sexual submission as well as the fear of it. The narrative seems to take the form of a dream sequence and is laced with astonishingly mature sarcasm and gentle wit. It is by far Anger's greatest film and a landmark of the American avant-garde.

mike0323 I agree with Jean Cocteau, who said of Fireworks, "This film touches the quick of the soul, which is very rare." I also agree with Anger that Stanley Kubrick copied the volcano motif (an explosive motif related to the titular Fireworks motif) from Anger's other films and that Anger did in fact have copies of Kubrick's video store rental receipts showing that Kubrick had rented Anger's films from a NYC video store at the time Kubrick was putting the volcano motifs in his films. I feel you have to look beyond both the United States and England to find anyone who can truly appreciate Anger's contributions to world cinema.