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8 Ways To Wear Stirrup Pants (Yes, They're Back)

November 3, 2017, 1:30 pm
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Fashion had some of its most dramatic changes in the early 20th century, as women became more active in public life; specifically, as they started participating in popular sports of the time, like riding a horse or a bike.

Stirrup pants were first worn in the 1920s by horse riders, who needed their pants to stay in place after they put on their boots. A decade later the style was adapted by skiers, who first wore them during the Winter Olympics in Germany in the '30s. Then, in the '80s, as the fitness craze swept through the United States, stirrups made a comeback — this time, as part of everyday wear. But after that, they were relegated to the "never again pile," much like, well, crunchy hairspray-ed bangs and shiny spandex and any other relics of the decade.

But stirrup pants are back again, thanks in part to — surprise! — Balenciaga, where Demna Gvesalia's whole ploy seems to be to sell us all the things we said "never again" to, at four times their original price. The weird thing is, we are kind of into them? They're a simple way to add a bit of an edge to any outfit, and there's something about putting the strap over the shoe that is just the right amount of "editorial" without looking like you're trying too hard.

Because of that, we've rounded up eight ways to wear the trend without looking like you're going to a costume party. A little throwback never hurt nobody, right?

Purple stirrup pants sound like a lot, but when you pair them with a chunky pair of neutral brown heels, they pretty much become a neutral too.

Foto: Pinterest via Style DuMonde 

If you're feeling shy about experimenting with such an "edgy" style, style it with the classics — think: a navy sweater, a white pump.

Foto: Pinterest via Vogue Paris 

If you want to experiment with multiple patterns, a pair of stirrup pants can act as the literal glue strap that holds it all together.

Foto: Pinterest via Style DuMonde 

Sometimes, the way to wear something with such a loaded history is by acknowledging its beginnings. The black version, paired with a white pump with a v-cut topline detail, says, "Yes, I know my pants are delightfully Back to the Future, and that's why I love them."

Foto: Pinterest via Who What Wear UK 

On rainy days, stirrup pants can also offer the illusion of practical dressing — even if you're wearing high heels.

Foto: Pinterest via elle.com 

Oversized hoodie? Check. Gucci Bag? Check. Stirrup athletic-inspired pants? Check. Super-high neon pumps? Check. Sometimes, completely owning up to the fact that you never met a trend you didn't like is also a way to pull off said trend.

Foto: Pinterest via Style.com 

The problem with stirrup pants is that sometimes — much like when you wore ill-fitting tights as a child — the crotch can hang low and you'll spend the whole day trying to fix it. But if you start with looser-fitting pants, you eliminate that problem completely (and end up with a look that's even office-appropriate).

Foto: Pinterest via vuefashion.org 

And perhaps the most genius tip of them all — are you into the look but don't feel like investing in a new pair of pants? Buy a few pairs of fit clips, attach to the hem of your trousers, and done! Instant cool look.

Foto: Pinterest via Who What Wear 

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Easy Comfort Food Soups That You Won't Believe Are Vegan

November 3, 2017, 1:40 pm
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Vegan and comfort food aren't necessarily two dining concepts we would couple together — especially now that the seasons have changed and we've started to favor cooked-hot dishes over fresh-cold ones. But, that's a short-sighted assumption, because vegan recipes are certainly not exclusively made of leafy greens and raw veggies. There's a whole slew of filling, comfort-food quality recipes around that also happen to be dairy-free and vegetarian. The kinds of dishes that are just begging to be whipped up during the oncoming chilly months. And what's one of our favorite affordable and easy cold-weather food staples of all time? Soup.

Here to prove to us that meat and dairy-free soups can still be hearty winter feasts are three rich recipes from Vanessa Croessmann's aptly-named cookbook, Awesome Vegan Soups. From creamy butternut squash bisques to chunky sweet potato chilis and more, scroll on for your fill of three vegan winners to keep you warm all fall and winter long.

Roasted Apple Butternut Squash Soup
Makes 2½ qts

Ingredients
½ butternut squash, seeds removed
2 tbsp olive oil, divided
2 apples, peeled, quartered and cored
1 yellow onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 cups (720 ml) vegetable broth
Pinch of nutmeg
Salt and pepper
Pumpkin seeds, for garnish

Instructions
1. Preheat the oven to 425°F (220°C) and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Cut the butternut squash in half. Place one of the halves in the fridge for later use. Remove the seeds from the other butternut squash half and set aside. Rub 1 tablespoon (15 ml) of olive oil over the apples and butternut squash and place them on the lined baking sheet. The squash should be placed face down. Roast the apples and squash in the oven for 30 to 45 minutes until the squash is tender. Remove the squash and apples from the oven and allow them to cool for at least 10 minutes.

2. While the apples and squash are cooling, heat 1 tablespoon (15 ml) of olive oil in a large stockpot, add the diced onion and cook for 5 to 7 minutes over medium-high heat. Add the minced garlic to the stockpot and cook for another minute until the garlic becomes fragrant.

3. At this point, the squash and apples should be cool enough to handle. Add the apples to the pot and scoop the butternut squash flesh with a spoon into the pot. Discard the tough butternut squash skin. Pour the vegetable broth and nutmeg into the stockpot and bring to a boil. Purée the soup using an immersion blender, or in batches in a blender, until smooth.

4. Season with salt and pepper to taste and serve hot. Garnish with pumpkin seeds.

Recipes excerpted from Awesome Vegan Soups by Vanessa Croessmann, Page Street Publishing Co. 2017.

Photo: Courtesy of Vanessa Croessmann.

Sweet Potato Chili
Makes 3 qts

Ingredients
2 tbsp olive oil
1 large yellow onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
⅛ cup paprika
2 tsp cayenne pepper, optional
1 tbsp ground cumin
1 tbsp dried oregano
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp salt
1 green bell pepper, diced, plus more for garnish
1 lb. chopped sweet potatoes
3 Roma tomatoes, diced
4 cups tomato purée
4 cups water
Vegan sour cream
Fresh cilantro
Chili peppers
Chives
Scallions
Avocado, sliced

Instructions
1. Heat the olive oil in a large stockpot over medium heat. Add the chopped onion and cook for 5 minutes until it begins to soften. Add the garlic, spices, salt, bell pepper and sweet potatoes and cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

2. Add the diced tomatoes, tomato purée and water to the stockpot. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Once boiling, reduce the heat to low-medium and simmer for 20 to 30 minutes until the chili thickens and the sweet potatoes can be pierced easily with a fork. Season the soup with more salt to taste.

3. Serve the chili hot with your favorite chili toppings such as sour cream, fresh cilantro, chili peppers, chives, scallions and avocado.

Recipes excerpted from Awesome Vegan Soups by Vanessa Croessmann, Page Street Publishing Co. 2017.

Broccoli “Cheddar” Soup
Makes 1 qt

Ingredients
2 tsp olive oil
1 yellow onion, diced
4 cups (280 g) broccoli florets
1 cup (200 g) Vegan Cheddar Cheese
Sauce (page 186)
2 cups (480 ml) water
2 cups (480 ml) vegetable broth
Salt and pepper

Instructions
1. Heat the olive oil in a pot and add the onion. Cook the onion over medium-high heat for 5 minutes until it starts to become translucent. Reduce the heat and add the broccoli and cheese sauce. Stir to coat the broccoli with cheese sauce before adding the water and vegetable broth. Bring all the ingredients to a boil, then reduce the heat, cover and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes until the broccoli is cooked.

2. Purée the soup using an immersion blender or in batches in a blender. Season the soup with salt and pepper to taste before serving.

Recipes excerpted from Awesome Vegan Soups by Vanessa Croessmann, Page Street Publishing Co. 2017.

Awesome Vegan Soups by Vanessa Croessmann, $16.89, available at Amazon.

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POTUS Said What?!: Cut, Cut, Cut

November 3, 2017, 2:05 pm
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Welcome to POTUS Said What?!, a weekly roundup of Trump’s most asinine and ineloquent sound bytes and our effort to understand WTF he’s even talking about.

This week, Trump is sad that he can’t take over the Department of Justice, is getting under Republican leadership’s skin with his latest tax cut plan branding suggestion, and is excited to mansplain East Asian history to the people of...East Asia.

“What we have right now is a joke and it’s a laughingstock.”

WTF? President Trump had this and many more words to say about the federal justice system after the terrorist attack in New York City that left eight people dead. He suggested at a press conference that there should be “quicker” and “greater” ways to seek justice on these “these animals” than what they get now. Of course, Trump’s distaste for the Justice Department should be taken with a grain of salt given that the man has the FBI investigating his campaign’s potential ties to a foreign government. I’m no Nancy Drew, but that seems a little fishy.

In addition to insulting the DOJ for not doing what he wants, Trump tweeted about sending the suspected terrorist to Guantanamo Bay and seeking the death penalty. (And in typical Trump fashion, he walked back his Guantanamo Bay remark days later.)

“The Cut Cut Cut Act.”

WTF? Republicans in the House of Representatives just unveiled their big tax plan. Aside from the issues with the bill (and oh, there are many, many problems), the cherry on top of the hot mess sundae that is the GOP trying to pass this legislation is that the bill doesn’t have a catchy name they can hock to Americans when they’re trying to screw them over in favor of rich corporations. Damnit!

Of course, Trump isn’t too concerned what’s actually in the bill. The dude cares about spin though, and that involves naming it. His reported suggestion? The Cut Cut Cut Act. Yes, really.

“I tell China, and I tell everyone else that listens, I mean, you're going to have yourself a big problem with Japan pretty soon if you allow this to continue with North Korea."

WTF? Donald Trump is about to set off on his first big trip to Asia as president, and thank goodness the people of Asia have The Donald to tell them that the regime in North Korea is an issue. It must come as a absolute shock to folks in China and Japan, who totally haven’t gone through centuries (nay, millennia) of infighting, war, colonization, and exploitation between groups in the region. But okay, Trump. Do you.

“The saddest thing, is because I'm the president of the United States, I'm not supposed to be involved in the Justice Department.”

WTF? Ugh, conflicts of interest are the darndest thing. This week, Trump suddenly became really, really interested in locking up former presidential opponent Hillary Clinton, who’s already been cleared by the FBI — twice — in the wake of her private email server scandal.

Of course, the reason why Trump once again wants a first class ticket on the “lock her up” train isn’t surprising: News broke on Monday that three members of his former campaign, including his then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, were arrested by Robert Mueller’s special counsel under a variety of charges, from money laundering to lying to federal investigators. Ah, there’s nothing like the people at all levels of your campaign being unlawful as hell to make you want to imprison political adversaries.

“I don't think there's been any president in the first nine or 10 months that has done as much.”

WTF? Delusion is a hell of a drug, as witnessed by Trump talking nonstop about how great he thinks he is during an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. Sure, personal Trump hero Abraham Lincoln was leading the Union into the Civil War to end slavery when he took office; Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed 76 bills in his first 100 days to bring the country out of the most devastating economic depression it’s ever seen; and Harry Truman was dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities and working with the Allies to bring World War II to an end during his initial tenure as president.

But attacking everyone from leaders of your own party to professional football players on a social media platform, rolling back protections that affect millions of American lives, and not passing any major legislation is all stuff too, I guess.

Lily Herman is a contributing editor at Refinery29. Follow her on Twitter. The views expressed are her own.

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You'll Make This Sweet-Potato Chili All Season Long

November 3, 2017, 3:05 pm
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Turkey Chilli: RSVP Episode 1

After that stretch of warm weather, the cool autumn temperatures are a welcome change of pace. Suddenly, we're all about fuzzy sweaters, lingering over seasonal beverages (you know the one), and preparing warm, healthy meals at home with a furry friend by our side. Need a little recipe inspo? Try out this deliciously simple sweet potato, black bean, and turkey chili. Whip up a bowl for yourself, and treat your pup to equally nourishing fuel like Castor & Pollux Pristine™ pet food, the only complete line of pet food made with responsibly sourced ingredients. Ready to enjoy a cozy night of dining in with your favorite four-legged companion?

Sweet Potato, Black Bean & Turkey Chili
Serves 6

Ingredients
1 tbsp olive oil, plus more if needed
1 red onion, diced
3 large garlic cloves
1 pound organic ground turkey
1 medium organic sweet potato, diced
2 tsp chipotle powder
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp dried oregano
2 cups vegetable broth or water
1 28-oz can fire-roasted crushed tomatoes
2 15-oz cans black beans, drained and rinsed
2–3 tsp sea salt
2 cups chopped kale
6 tbsp chopped cilantro, for serving
6 tbsp shredded pepper jack or cheddar cheese, for serving
6 tbsp Greek yogurt, for serving (optional)
6 lime wedges

Instructions
1. Warm olive oil in a large pot over medium heat.
2. Add onion and garlic and sauté until translucent, about 5 minutes, stirring.
3. Add turkey and cook, breaking up with a spoon, until browned.
4. Add sweet potato, chipotle, cumin, paprika, and oregano; stir to toast the spices.
5. Add vegetable broth along with tomatoes, black beans, and sea salt. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low and cover. Simmer chili for 60–90 minutes.
6. Add kale towards the end, and cook until it's soft, a few minutes more. Then remove chili from heat.
7. Batch it! Ladle the chili into 6 individual heat-safe plastic or glass containers. Top with about 1 tablespoon each of cilantro, shredded cheese, and yogurt, and finish with a lime wedge. Store in the fridge or freezer.

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You HAVE To See Beyonce's Five-Outfit Tribute To Lil' Kim

November 3, 2017, 3:15 pm
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I'd like to present you, dear readers and fellow Beyoncé stans, with a luxurious fantasy. Picture it: Bey lets her hair down — well, actually, puts it up — to adopt some peak 90's, Lil' Kim wigs and neon extra-ness. The Queen Bey dressing up as Queen Bee, if you will. A true dream, amiright?

Except you don't have to imagine that, because that is a reality that just happened. Nope, this is indeed not a drill. We already knew that Beyoncé dressed up as Lil' Kim for Halloween, of course, alongside her husband, Jay-Z, who was the Notorious B.I.G, and we got a few small sneak peeks at her look earlier this week.

But what not a single one of us was expecting was for Beyonce to casually come through on a Friday afternoon — three full days after Halloween has ended, might I add — to channel some of Lil' Kim's most iconic looks with five full-on outfits. (I really don't even want to call them costumes, because these looks are too spot on and too fly to relegate them to such a status.) I don't even know why I'm shocked, as Mrs. Carter is by now also the Queen of Surprises, but I gasped harder and let my jaw fall further with every single photo that she unveiled on her website Friday afternoon. I was in awe of not just the looks, but the fact that the biggest pop star of all time (yes, that is a statement, not an opinion) gave Lil' Kim, the biggest female hip hop star of all time some long overdue credit. And not just for her fashion risks, but for the many ways Kim inherently owned her own sexuality through both her body language and clothing, long before it was considered acceptable in mainstream pop-culture — for Black women, especially.

So let's dive into these here works of art. First, there is a photo of the costume that we'd already gotten a quick look at: Beyoncé in dark hair, Chanel suspenders, and oversized shades giving us "The Rain" realness from the 1997 music video with Missy Elliott.

IT AIN’T OVER TILL YONCÉ.

A post shared by Beylite (@beylite) on

Next, Yoncé rolled out this unforgettable blue Chanel-printed wig and navel-grazing crucifix chain from Kim's 2001 photoshoot with Manhattan File magazine:

IT AIN’T OVER TILL YONCÉ.

A post shared by Beylite (@beylite) on

And then, here is that Bey in a sexy blue nightie-and-fur look from Lil' Kim's Today's Blackwoman Magazine in 2000:

IT AIN’T OVER TILL YONCÉ. 💙

A post shared by Beylite (@beylite) on

And, drumroll please...This is the moment we saw the Lemonade goddess go all the way there in a silver wig, neon green two-piece, and accompanying fur — a look we saw yet another music queen, Rihanna, give a little nod to at the 2015 iHeart Radio Music Awards:

IT AIN’T OVER TILL YONCÉ. 🐝 💚

A post shared by Beylite (@beylite) on

Oh, and that's not even all. There are many more ridiculously stunning odes to the rapper, including Bey in a barely-there, nude see-through number like Kim's 1991 Source Hip-Hop Music Awards red carpet situation, and other outtakes from her other looks. You can see the full photoshoot at Beyonce.com.

But before we depart, can we all please stop to have a moment of silence for Bey's excellent attention to detail: Homegirl is so thorough, she changed "Getty Images" in her version of the original photos to "Petty images." I. Can. Not. My wig, my brain, my soul — consider it all snatched. My new goal in life is to up my wig and neon clothing collections so that I, too can channel Lil' Kim at the drop of a dime, Halloween or not.

All hail the Queens.

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What Taylor Swift's New Make-Under Really Means

November 3, 2017, 3:45 pm
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Unless you've been living on a tropical island without Wi-Fi, you probably know (at least) a little about the drama that's been following Taylor Swift around for the past year or so. There's a lot to unpack, which has led to both fans and haters speculating that her upcoming album, Reputation, addresses her side of the story.

From her tumultuous relationship with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, to the name-calling the singer received lately, you don't have to surf for long to get caught up. But her latest single, "Call It What You Want," is a major departure from her last three releases and suggests a different vibe for her forthcoming album — and a new beauty look to match.

From what we can tell, the overwhelming response to her fourth single is totally positive. Whether she's admitting defeat by apologizing for all the public squabbles that went down last year, or just simply singing about being happy and in love, there's certainly something different here.

The private videos-turned-music video — at least that's what it looks like to us — appear to deliver a look at a more grounded, new Taylor. (She did say the "old Taylor" was dead, if you recall.) Naturally, this softer side of the star, seen riding horses and painting, comes with a make-under, too. That is: No red lipstick in sight, no "Shake It Off" bob and blunt bangs, and we even spotted her natural curls. According to Twitter, this might be the real image Swift is ready to bring back.

Whether you think this is Swift giving us raw honesty and vulnerability or it's a clever move for redemption, it's hard to deny the pattern we've seen in Hollywood before. Most recently, Miley Cyrus reigned as the queen of the make-under. Alongside her new album Younger Now, Cyrus was featured on multiple magazine covers and her "Malibu" music video where her naked face took center stage.

Only time will tell what this new make-under means the star, but were betting there will be a lot less red lipstick in her future.

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The VS Angels Have Personalized Lip Kits — & They're A Steal

November 3, 2017, 4:45 pm
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Kylie Cosmetics has its fan base of those who love the hyper-pigmented matte liquid lipsticks known for creating lip volume that practically begs for a selfie pout. But there's at least one group that hasn't bought into the over-lined, brightly colored look, and that group is supermodels. By and large, fresh-faced, off-duty models go for balm — tinted on occasion, if they're feeling crazy.

That's why we were surprised to find that four of the Victoria's Secret Angels just launched their very own lip kits — with one product more than Kylie's to boot.

The lingerie brand is focusing heavily on makeup this holiday season, specifically for the lips. And, true to form, it's really, really sexy. The newest collection showcases four of the Angels — Elsa Hosk, Sara Sampaio, Jasmine Tookes, and Martha Hunt — and their signature lip looks. Inside each kit, there's a Victoria's Secret Velvet Matte Cream Lip Stain (from the existing collection) along with a liner to match. And it doesn't stop there: Keeping with the high-shine trend, there's a sparkly glitter gloss in there, too.

The specific shades are personalized to each model. Sampaio has a bold red called "Desire;" Hunt's is "Adorned," a soft pale pink shade; Hosk has a similar dusty, pinky rose color; and Tookes' "Bordeaux" is a red-wine berry shade. All perfectly complement each Angel's skin tone and aesthetic, but they're just as wearable for those of us who aren't walking runways in million-dollar Fantasy Bras.

More good news? These three-piece sets ring in at under $25, so pick up yours before they sell out. Because, chances are, they will sell out. If we know anything, it's that people love lip kits almost as much as they love the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show.

Victoria's Secret Angel Lip Kit, $24.50, available at Victoria's Secret.

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These Movies Will Hurt Your Brain (In A Good Way)

November 3, 2017, 6:10 pm
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Photo: Snap Stills/REX/Shutterstock.

WARNING: So many spoilers ahead! Plot twists unraveled. Endings revealed. Proceed at your own risk.

March 16 marks the 15th anniversary of the release of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, one of the greatest mindfuck movies of all time. What makes something a quality mindfuck movie? Sometimes, it’s a twist ending that seems to come out of nowhere and truly shocks you, because the reveal means you have to go back and rethink everything that happened during the course of the entire movie.

Take The Sixth Sense, for example. After you found out that Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) was dead the entire time, you had to recall every scene in which you thought Dr. Crowe interacted with characters besides Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Nope; it turns out he only interacts with Cole after he gets shot in the beginning of the movie. He really has been dead the whole time. M. Night Shyamalan, you trickster, you.

Other times, a movie fucks with your head from beginning to end. It leads you one way, then swerves sharply to the left. The plot isn't remotely linear, although it appeared to be (ahem, Triangle). Or you can’t even figure out what’s going on at all. Think Christopher Nolan’s Inception, or Shane Carruth's Primer.

And then there are psychological thrillers like Black Swan and The Machinist, which trap the viewer inside a character’s breakdown without providing a complete picture of what’s happening. In the words of U2, “Now you're stuck in a moment, and you can’t get out of it.” Also in the words of U2: "Don't say that later will be better," because you'll be obsessing about what happened in that goddamn movie you just watched. (Sidenote: Is Bono a mindfuck movie prophet? Please discuss.)

But when it comes to this magical mindfuckery that makes you wonder what you just watched for hours on end, why would you ever want to want to get out of these moments?

And one more reminder that there are MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD — so major you may as well call them majorettes and stick 'em in front of a marching band twirling batons.

Gone Girl(2014)
Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike
Directed By: David Fincher
Written By: Gillian Flynn

On the surface, Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) have the perfect marriage. But all's not well in the kingdom of Denmark — or, in this case, we should say Carthage, Missouri. On their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy goes missing inexplicably, and leaves Nick as the prime suspect. As with the novel, the film shifts between perspectives of the two people in the marriage. Things are not as they seem in the disappearance or in the marriage.

Asylum Seekers(2009)
Starring: Pepper Binkley, Bill Dawes, Judith Hawking
Directed By: Rania Ajami
Written By:Rania Ajami, Jake Pilikian

In this weird little indie, six people try to escape from the mundanity of their daily lives by checking into a mental asylum. The problem? There's only room for one of them. They'll have to compete to prove which is the most mentally unstable, and thus worthy of entering the psychiatric hospital.

The Illusionist(2006)
Starring: Ed Norton, Jessica Biel
Directed by: Neil Burger
Written by: Neil Burger, Steven Millhauser

This movie is often lumped with Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, since they're both period piece magician films. But The Illusionist has a twist of its own. Edward Norton plays Eisenheim the Illusionist in Vienna in the year 1889. He was locked in a love triangle with the Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary (casual) and a woman named Sophie (Jessica Biel), as he tells the Vienna's Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti), who's inspecting Eiseinheim's role in Sophie's death. Uhl thinks he has figured out what happened between Sophie, Leopold, and Eisenheim, but he forgets that he's dealing with an illusionist. There are things Eisenheim will continue to reveal over the course of his retelling, twists that he designed long ago.

Split(2017)
Starring: James MacAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy
Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Written by: M. Night Shyamalan

Kevin (James McAvoy) is a handful to deal with, perhaps because he has 23 personalities. He kidnaps three teenagers, subjecting them to the full gamut of his mental state. "Dennis" is Kevin's dominant personality, but there's one who has yet to emerge. And that personality wants control.

Of course, since it's a Shyamalan movie, lots of violent and fascinating twists follow that set Split up for a sequel.

Sliding Doors
Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow, John Hannah
Directed by: Peter Howitt
Written by: Peter Howitt

Sliding Doors is the most philosophical rom-com around. Depending on whether Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow) manages to board a London tube train, her life branches off into wildly different directions. In one reality, Helen gets on the train, and catches her boyfriend with another woman. In another, she misses the train, and continues to be betrayed by him. Eventually, these two realities intertwine in a bittersweet way. Sliding Doors is a reminder that our life paths are shaped by insignificant decisions, which eventually have massive repercussions. Think of that next time you get on a subway.

Mother!(2017)
Starring: Javier Bardem, Jennifer Lawrence
Directed by: Darren Aronofsky
Written by: Darren Aronofsky

This is a two-hour long mind bend. Aronofsky didn't make Mother! to give audiences an enjoyable movie experience. Instead, Mother!, the story of a woman married to an older artist in an old house, is designed to make you uncomfortable. As you watch Jennifer Lawrence's character unspool house's that's changing in wild ways, you might lose your grip, too.

Coherence(2014)
Starring: Emily Baldoni, Maury Sterling, Nicholas Brendon
Written By: James Ward Byrkit
Directed By: James Ward Byrkit

A comet flies overhead while a group of friends are at a dinner party. This cosmic phenomenon has big effects on the neighborhood. The comet actually rearranges different realities, so that people can quickly cross from one dimension to another. When the eight party members explore the neighborhood after the power goes out, they don't realize that they're actually crossing over into multiple realities, and meeting other version of them selves. Eventually, this intertwining will cease. Which reality will they get stuck in?

Equally astounding is how the film was made. Each day, the actors received a notecard with some rudimentary direction and motivation for their characters. And then, everyone just acted. No script. No special effects. Just real people, acting, and blowing your mind.

A Tale of Two Sisters
Starring: Yum Jung-Ah, Soo-jung Lim
Written By: Kim Jee-woon
Directed By: Kim Jee-woon

This Korean thriller has everything you could want in a mind f*** movie. A beautifully decorated house with skeletons in every closet. A family with secrets. Many, many questions of identity.

The story starts when teenager Su-mi (Yeom Jeong-ah) is released from a mental institution, and moves back home with her sister, Su-yeon (Su-jeong Lim) and their father. Their father has recently remarried the former nurse of their biological mother. The surreal events that follow are based loosely on a traditional Korean folktale.

Altered States
Starring: William Hurt
Directed by: Ken Russell
Written by: Paddy Chayefsky

This Harvard professor is extremely devoted to his studies. Perhaps too devoted, considering Eddie Jessup's (William Hurt) studies are the effects of hallucinogenic drugs in curing psychological conditions, like schizophrenia. As he continues to flip-flop between sensory deprivation and hallucinations, the real world literally starts to become a palette upon which he casts his imagination. With its visual pyrotechnics and sound effects, this experimental film pulls viewers into Eddie's reality, or lack thereof.

The Shining(1980)
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Shelly Duvall
Directed by: Stanley Kubrick
Written by: Stanley Kubrick, Diane Johnson

While a staple of the horror movie genre, The Shining is, at its core, a mind-blowing movie of the psychological thriller genre — plus some ghosts. After getting the bright idea to move his family to a Colorado resort in winter, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) descends into madness. As he stalks the hallways creepily, his young son begins to have psychic premonitions indicating that the Overlook Hotel itself is preying on its new, unwanted inhabitants.

The Skin I Live In(2011)
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya
Directed by: Pedro Almodóvar
Written by: Pedro Almodóvar

When you see an Almodóvar film, you know to expect a certain level of weirdness — typically in uncommon relationship pairings and deep, twisted histories between people. In his take on a psychological thriller, Almodóvar keeps those elements (especially the deep, twisted histories) and cranks them up to terrifying heights. In the film, Banderas plays a plastic surgeon, Robert Legard, intent on developing a synthetic skin able to save the lives of burned victims, since his own wife had died of burns. With the help of his faithful servant, Legard takes a woman named Vera captive to function as his in-house lab rat. As the movie proceeds, you see that Vera's relationship to Legard is far more complicated than just prisoner and captive. Unweaving The Skin I Live In 's many plot twists would require a thesis. Better to watch and bite your nails yourself.

Sound Of My Voice (2012)
Starring: Brit Marling, Christopher Denham, Nicole Vicious
Directed by: Zal Batmanglij
Written by: Brit Marling, Zal Batmanglij

This 2012 thriller starring Brit Marling will send you reeling. The film also stars Christopher Denham and Nicole Vicious as two journalists Peter and Lorna who attempt to infiltrate an insular cult in order to take it down. Marling plays Maggie, the leader of the cult. Maggie is from the year 2054, and she's here to collect a group of people to save the future world. Her followers wear all white and perform a super-secret special handshake. She's also wanted for several felonies.

The mind fuckery in this movie never allows you to decide if Maggie is lying or not. First, you're with Peter and Lorna, doubting this snake oil-peddler. But when Peter starts to buy into Maggie's narrative, you begin to doubt your own conviction. Maybe Maggie is from the future.

The moment of decision occurs when Maggie instructs Peter to kidnap a little girl — the girl is allegedly Maggie's mother. Will he comply? Yes. And then the big shocker happens: the little girl knows the cult's secret handshake. Ostensibly, the girl taught it to Maggie at some point in the future.

But before you can say, "gee, that was a whammy," Maggie is arrested, courtesy of Lorna. And you, the viewer, still don't know who was lying and who was crazy.

Primal Fear(1996)

Starring: Richard Gere, Edward Norton, Laura Linney
Directed by: Gregory Hoblit

A meek, young altar boy with a stutter is charged with the murder of an archbishop. Martin Vail, a Chicago defense attorney who likes a challenge, agrees to take Aaron Stampler's case — though the evidence is racked up against Stampler. As the case proceeds, Vail uncovers that Stampler was part of a sex ring the Archbishop was running. After years of abuse, Stampler developed a violent alter ego named Roy, who carries out the murder.

After the judge finds Stampler not guilty by reason of insanity, Stampler reveals that Roy isn't his alter ego. Aaron is. The stutter and the meekness was all a front.

Blade Runner (1982)

Starring: Harrison Ford

Directed by: Ridley Scott

Written by: Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on a novel by Phillip K. Dick

In this distant future, androids, called replicants, are physically indistinguishable from humans. They can only be rooted out through the Voight-Kampff interrogation system, a series of questions replicants are incapable of answering.

Replicants aren't allowed on earth, but sometimes they escape their off-world colonies and seek refuge amongst humans. People like Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) are blade-runners, and it's their job to sniff out replicants. While he's on his biggest mission yet, Deckard falls for a highly advanced replicant — so human he begins to doubt his entire society's system.

The ambiguous ending implies that Deckard may be an android himself.

The Lobster(2016)

Starring: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz

Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos

Written by: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthymis Filippou

In this dystopian future, all individuals unable to find a long-term relationship are turned into animals. Single stragglers are sent to the Hotel, where they're supposed to find a partner within 45 days, or be sent into the Woods in their new beastly state. Colin Farrell plays David, a man at the Hotel who decides to join the loners, people who drop out of society and abstain from sex. How you read the film's ambiguous ending determines how you feel about love, relationships, and sacrifice.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Starring: Ivana Baquero, Sergi Lopez

Directed by: Guillermo Del Toro

Written by: Guillermo Del Toro

Five years after the Spanish Civil War, a girl named Ofelia becomes pulled into a fantasy world outside her doorstep. In a twist straight out of Narnia, she's led to a labyrinth, where she meets a wily faun and lots of other unforgettable creatures. The faun swears that Ofelia is actually a princess, but in order to unlock her status, she has to complete a series of tasks.

Meanwhile, Ofelia's pregnant mother becomes sicker and sicker. Her sadistic army captain of a step-father becomes meaner and meaner. And the fantasy world becomes incredibly dark.

The Truman Show (2013)

Starring: Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Ed Harris

Directed by: Peter Weir

Written by: Andrew Nicchol

Truman Burbank has lived his entire life in the quintessence of small-town America. His community is tight-knit and supportive, and everyone plays their roles. That's because, of course, they're all playing roles. Truman is the only non-actor in the reality TV show about his life. Slowly, he begins to put the pieces together — and then he'll do anything to get out, and trod a world that's much better than he ever could've imagined.

Even more mind-blowing than The Truman Show 's plot are its implications. What if everyone you know is in on the joke?

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Starring: Phillip Seymour Hoffman

Directed by: Charlie Kaufman

Written by: Charlie Kaufman

This is an indie film with the mantra, "art imitates life imitates art, and repeat." In Synecdoche, New York, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Conrad, a troubled theater director who throws himself into a strangely realistic theater piece. In a warehouse in Manhattan, a group of actors live out their fictionalized, constructed lives. Soon, the warehouse takes on the realism of the bustling city outside. The years pass. The plot grows convoluted. Caden hires doppelgangers for the actors to make the endeavor even more hectic. As Caden loses his mind, who will be there to give the play direction?

A Scanner Darkly(2006)

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder

Directed by: Richard Linklater

Written by: Richard Linklater

Based on the mind-bending novel by William S. Gibson, this movie uses an uncanny animation technique to capture the interplay between reality and unstable mental states. A Scanner Darkly is set in a totalitarian state in the future, after America has lost the war on drugs. Over 20% of the population is hooked on a drug called Substance D. In response, the government has developed an underground network of informants to try to infiltrate the drug supply chain.

Detective Bob Arctor is a cog in this machine, assigned to immerse himself in the shady underworld. But once he's in with the addicts, it's impossible to stop becoming hooked himself. At the New Path recovery center, Bob begins to lose his identity and experience schizophrenic behavior.

Spider(2002)

Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Gabriel Byrne

Directed by: David Cronenberg

Written by: Patrick McGrath

After years in a sanitarium, Denis Cleg moves to a halfway house for the mentally disturbed. And for an hour and a half, we enter into the suffering, shifty mindset of a man trying to piece together a formative memory from this childhood. In flashbacks, Denis sees his father, his mother, the prostitute with whom his father is involved, and a younger version of himself. Within Denis's mind, the four characters go through a choreography of remembrance. What are the events that led to his mother's murder? You'll find out the answer to that question in this psychological thriller, but it's not the twist that'll stay with you. Denis's twisted perspective will haunt you.

The Matrix(2013)

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Lawrence Fisburne

Directed by: Lana and Lily Wachowski

Written by: Lana and Lily Wachowski

Neo lives through every 1990s kid's nightmare: finding out that he's living, essentially, in The Sims. Our trusty protagonist discovers that everything he thinks of as "reality" is actually a video game-esque simulation. Once he realizes that nothing is real, then everything (including dodging bullets) is possible.

But The Matrix recognizes the burden of such knowledge. In one of cinema's most iconic scenes, Neo is offered the red pill to proceed on his journey, or the blue pill to forget and go back to the way he was. Neo chooses the red pill; the rest is movie history.

The Fountain (2006)

Starring: Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz

Directed by: Darren Aronofsky

Written by: Darren Aronofsky

We can tell you what happens in The Fountain, but we can’t confirm what actually happens.

This intricate magical romantic drama interweaves three storylines separated by centuries and miles. In the first, Hugh Jackman plays Tom Creo, a 21st century doctor losing his wife, Izzi (Rachel Weisz), to cancer. Tom’s consumed with finding a cure using samples from “The Tree of Life,” a species found in South America, and forgoes quality time with Izzi for time in his lab.

While he’s in the lab, Izzi takes to the pen and writes a story about a conquistador, Tomas Verde, searching for the Tree of Life for Queen Isabella. But Izzi doesn’t have time to finish the story — she asks him to finish it. While they stare at the stars, Izzi imagines they’ll meet, once again, the stars. Appropriately, the final narrative is set in deep space, with an astronaut named Tommy.

But we’ve laid things out in an easy way. In truth, nothing is told in chronological order, not even the storylines themselves. The three storylines are confusingly connected and difficult to unweave.

Acknowledging the infinite interpretative possibilities of the movie, Aronofsky said, “[The film is] very much like a Rubik's Cube, where you can solve it in several different ways, but ultimately there's only one solution at the end.” He believes the film is about coming to terms with your own death. It’s a beautiful film, if a grim message.

Timer(2009)

Starring: Emma Caulfield, Michelle Borth

Directed by: Jac Schaffer

Written by: Jac Schaffer

What if you could count down to the exact moment you’d meet your soulmate? People in this alternate reality can opt into just that. When a TiMER device is implanted, a countdown begins to establish just that. Oona O’Leary, Timer ’s protagonist, faces an uncommon quandary: her TiMER is blank, which means her soulmate — whoever he is — has yet to get his TiMER implanted.

Steph, her roommate and sister, has a TiMER that indicates she won’t meet her soulmate until she’s 43. She’s been seeing Dan, a widower who doesn’t have a TiMER so not to cheapen his marriage.

Instead of twiddling her thumbs until Mr. Right comes around, Oona dates off the TiMER. She falls for Mikey, a supermarket clerk with a countdown of four months.

After a while, Oona and Steph decide to get their TiMERs removed irrevocably. At that precise moment, though, Oona's countdown suddenly starts, meaning that her soul mate has finally gotten his TiMER. It’s the night of Oona and Steph’s birthday, and Dan, the widower, is there. As soon as she sees Dan, her own TiMER goes off. Feelings will be stepped on — what’s a girl to do?

While

Mr. Nobody (2004)
Starring: Jared Leto, Diane Kruger, Rhys Ifans
Directed by: Jaco Van Dormael
Written by: Jaco Van Dormael

In this sci-fi-meets-coming of age movie, we see the three different paths that Jared Leto’s character’s life could have taken. A nine-year-old boy stands on a platform facing an impossible choice. He chooses to go with his mother; he chooses to go with his father; he chooses to run away. What happens next? Each path has its glories and its difficulties, and Nemo explores them all.

The film is narrated by Nemo Nobody, the man the little boy becomes, on his 118th birthday. In a sexless, ageless world, Nemo is the last living relic of the world as it was, and he’s able to track the permutations of his life. A journalist attempts to get to the truth of his story: which life did Nemo truly live? The answer will surprise you.

Mr. Nobody is an astounding, visually stunning movie that doesn’t shy away from toying with our existential quandaries, and the infinite paths of "what if."

Shutter Island (2010)
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Williams, Max von Sydow, Emily Mortimer
Directed By: Martin Scorsese
Written By: Laeta Kalogridis, Dennis Lehane

Listen, put a few characters in a hospital for the criminally insane, and some mind-fuckery will occur. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a U.S. Marshall (well) in this Martin Scorsese flick. He and his new partner Chuck (played by Mark Ruffalo) investigate an escapee named Rachel Solando, who once killed her three children.

The plot twist in this series is pretty predictable: the detective is actually the patient. Surprise! Leonardo DiCaprio's stubborn Boston boss is imprisoned in the mental hospital because he killed his manic depressive wife. Cheery, no? The "investigation" was just an exercise concocted by the doctors at the asylum to help the patient escape his paranoia. The final scene of the movie implies that DiCaprio's character will soon have a lobotomy, so at the very least, there's a happy ending.

Triangle (2009)
Starring: Melissa George, Joshua McIvor, Jack Taylor, Liam Hemsworth
Directed By: Christopher Smith
Written By: Christopher Smith

Ah, the best mind-fuckery relies on weird time jumps, and Triangle has time jumps a-plenty. The story opens like any other horror film. A few friends go yachting and end up in dangerous territory. They jump ship — literally — and head to a different ship, which ain't so friendly.

The big reveal: the "abandoned" ship forces everyone into a time loop. Events keep repeating themselves, and each time they do, a new incarnation of the person appears. As in, by the end of the film, the main character Jess (Melissa George) has at least 10 other Jesses to reckon with.

If you're still confused after viewing the movie, you're not alone. There's a 15-minute explainer on YouTube if you have the quarter hour to spare.

The Prestige (2006)
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Michael Caine, Christian Bale, Rebecca Hall
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Written by: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan

Before there was Westworld, there was The Prestige, the movie that made absolutely no sense until it all made sense. Borne from the bananas brain of the Nolan brothers, the film focuses on two magicians, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale.) After coming up together as young magicians, the two engage in a violent rivalry.

The big "huh?" of the film lies in Borden's "transported man" trick. Borden falls under the stage, and appears somewhere else in the theater entirely. Wow! Magic! Angier seeks to duplicate this trick, and he ultimately does by enlisting the help of Nikola Tesla. (Fun fact: David Bowie plays Tesla.)

Tesla invents a machine that clones Angier. Here's how it works: the magician clones himself. The original Angier drops beneath the stage into a water tank, where he drowns. The clone appears somewhere else in the theater, wowing the audience. Okay, cool trick, but the cost is high. Every time Angier completes the trick, he kills himself, or a version of himself. The eye-opening visual of the film occurs when Borden chances upon all the water tanks that contain versions of Angier's dead body. Damn.

Oh, but there's another twist. Want to know how Angier completed the trick? You may have seen this coming — I certainly didn't, but my father did. Angier had a twin the whole time, which is the oldest mind-fuck trick in the book. Nolan elevates that particular trick, which can seem a little cheap, by involving two separate women, both in love with Angier. The end of the movie reveals that the two women were actually in love with separate men, not the same man. (Mind. Blown.)

After Hours (1985)
Starring: Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Linda Fiorentino, Tommy Chong, Cheech Marin
Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Written by: Joseph Minion

Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) just really, really wants to go home. But this is New York City after hours, and only the weirdest and wackiest things happen.

Hackett is a word processor (back in the 1980s, when jobs like that actually existed). He's bored by the corporate drudgery and the uptown apartment that bookend his days. When he meets a Marcy, a woman at a diner who seems to like the same books as him, he's intrigued. Later that night, he calls Marcy up and takes a cab downtown to meet her in Soho. That's when the fun begins.

Everything goes from bad to worse for Hackett. First his cash flies out of the cab window, then he's freaked out by Marcy's weirdly intense roommate, Kiki. When he finally gets Marcy alone, she's busy rubbing some weird burn ointment on her body (but he can't really tell why). Soon enough he gets fed up and leaves. When he feels bad and returns a few hours later, Marcy has killed herself. So now he's broke, tired, and kind of on the lam, eventually taking refuge in a dive bar. Just as the Tim, the barkeep, agrees to lend Paul some money, it turns out the bartender's girlfriend killed herself in apartment in Soho. Yep, that's right: Marcy.

But Tim is a nice guy, and says that Hackett can have some cash if he runs around the corner to Tim's apartment to grab his keys to the bar's register. Twist: there's been a series of robberies in the building, so when Tim's neighbors see Paul, they assume he's the burglar, fresh from a robbery. Paul narrowly escapes their clutches, but the neighbors organize into a witch hunt, putting up posters all around the neighborhood. He then tries to hide out at a Soho nightclub, where Kiki told Marcy she'd head later.

From there, things only get weirder. One woman hits on Paul, another screams at him. When Paul asks a random guy on the street if he can crash at his apartment, the bespectacled man thinks Paul is trying to seduce him.

Finally — finally! — Paul escapes the mob and ends up in the backseat of the van of the real robbers. He's embalmed in a papier-mâché statue (that's how he escaped the mob), and falls out of the truck bed. Where does he end up? At the golden gates of his midtown office building.

Se7en(1996)
Starring: Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Gwyneth Paltrow
Directed by: David Fincher
Written by: Andrew Kevin Walker

William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is a careful, wise detective who is just a few days away from retiring. He's assigned to take a young rookie under his wing and show him the ropes of the gritty metropolis that's their turf. The young investigator, David Mills (Brad Pitt), is short-tempered and impatient, but eager to learn and get his hands dirty.

The pair slowly stumble upon a series of murders all bound by one familiar thread: the seven deadly sins. An obese man was forced to eat himself to death (gluttony); a defense attorney has his insides taken out (greed). Soon enough, Somerset and Mills find a good lead. A man named John Doe (Kevin Spacey) has been checking out library books about serial murders. They settle on him as their prime suspect and try to track him down as the murders continue.

After the fifth murder, a bloodied man meets Mills and Somerset at the police station, identifying himself as John Doe. He's been peeling off the skin on his fingertips all along, so it's impossible to perfectly ID his prints, but the men are convinced it's him. He promises to lead both detectives to the final two victims, but under very specific terms or he'll plead insanity.

Per Doe's instructions, the two detectives accompany their captive to a remote desert location. A delivery truck meets them, handing Somerset a box. Inside is the head of Mills' wife (Gwyneth Paltrow). When Doe brags about killing her and says that she was secretly pregnant, and he killed her out of his own envy. Mills weeps and hold Doe at gunpoint. Somerset protests, but he shoots him six times. Doe is the final death of the seven, because he forced Mills to give into his own wrath.

Hard Candy (2005)
Starring: Ellen Page, Patrick Wilson, Sandra Oh
Directed by: David Slade
Written by: Brian Nelson

Patrick Wilson plays Jeff, a photographer with a thing for teenage girls. He's charming and good looking, but the set up is as creepy as it sounds. Jeff preys on young girls, messaging them online and cultivating fake relationships that he seems to hope will end with real sexual favors.

Hayley is the latest girl talked into meeting him in person. But Hayley, who wears a notable red sweatshirt, has a plan of her own. She knows of Jeff's past transgressions with his victims, and she's decided to put a stop to it.

Jeff, it turns out, doesn't just flirt with underage girls. He also rapes and kills them, according to Hayley's spying. When he lures her back to his apartment, she drugs and tortures him to get information about a dead teenage girl whose death she suspects he had a hand in.

The tension in Hard Candy mounts with an eerie quickness, mostly because of the shifting power dynamic between Jeff and Hayley (the former thinks he's in control, the latter always is).

The Invitation (2016)
Starring: Logan Marshall-Green, Michiel Huisman, Tammy Blanchard, Emayatzy Corinealdi
Directed by: Karyn Kusama
Written by: Phil Hay, Matt Manfredi

It's been two years since a tragic accident killed Will (Marshall Green) and Eden's (Blanchard) young son in their Hollywood Hills home. Their marriage soon dissolved and, in an effort to move on, lost touch with one another. The movie begins with Will driving to his old house with his new girlfriend Kira (Corinealdi) — they've been invited to a dinner party, even though he hasn't heard from his ex-wife or her new husband in months.

Things start out warm enough, even as the stylishly modern house manages to dig up pained memories for Will. Then, out of the corner of his eye Will notices Eden's new husband David (Huisman) casually lock doors and cabinets. There are other couples there (old friends of Will and Eden's when they were married), good food, ritzy wine... it's a nice enough evening, albeit a bit awkward. Suddenly, the tone shifts. This isn't a reunion, it's a recruiting session for a cult.

A new, unfamiliar guest arrives. Everyone nestles into the living room and David asks them to keep an open mind as they watch a documentary of sorts. In the movie, a creepy pastor talks a dying woman through the end of her life. The couples all recoil, until the unfamiliar guest gives a kind of testimonial about loving his dead wife so much, and how this quasi-spirituality helped him overcome her death. The twist? He was the one who went to prison for killing her.

From there, Kusama perfectly manipulates the tension. Doors lock and unlock, and Will confronts Eden about blocking out their son's death between flashbacks of their former life together. In the thrilling climax they sit down to dinner. Eden serves a special drink. Will can't take it anymore — he demands everyone throw it out, and begs his girlfriend to leave with him. Just as he seems crazy, someone takes a sip and dies instantly. Will was right, the drink was poison.

The "invitation" was really an entry into a murder-suicide pact. Will and his girlfriend run frantically through his old house to escape Eden and David's wrath.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
Starring: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal, Sandy Dennis
Directed by: Mike Nichols
Written by: Ernest Lehman

Married couple George (Burton) and Martha (Taylor) arrive home from a party. Martha informs George that she’s invited a younger couple that she met there — Nick (Segal) and Honey (Dennis) — over for more drinks. Everyone is already quite drunk, but George and Martha get increasingly more drunk and verbally abusive towards one another.

Honey says that Martha told her about she and George’s son upcoming 16th birthday. This angers George. Honey runs to the bathroom to throw up from drinking too much. The night goes on and on with more upsetting moments.

George and Martha engage in a series of increasingly escalating games of psychological manipulation that makes their guests feel more and more uneasy. Finally, it becomes clear to Nick and Honey that the overarching game is for George and Martha to invent more and more details about their imaginary son, but to never mention his existence to anyone else. It seems that Martha lost this round, because she answers the title question, saying "I am."

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Starring: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester
Directed by: Stanley Kubrick
Written by: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clark

As one Reddit commenter summarizing the movie very succinctly describes it, “Black box gives superpowers. Black box plus monkey equals human. Human plus black box equals star baby. Star baby is awesome.” To expand on that a little, watch the four videos on the website Kubrick 2001, which delve into how it’s not just the monolith (black box) that speeds along evolution, it’s actually the discovery and improved development of functional tools that advances first apes, and then the human race.

The question is, though, what are the three monoliths that appear in the film — one one Earth, one on the Moon, and one on Jupiter? Since they have right angles, they aren’t naturally occurring in nature. As Roger Ebert wrote in 1968, “Who put [the monolith] there? Intelligent beings since it has right angles and nature doesn't make right angles on its own.” The monoliths are merely a device Kubrick uses to advance the plot, Ebert argues.

It’s not just the monoliths’ possible meaning that throws viewers into a quandary. The ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey usually confuses viewers the most. After Dr. David Bowman (Keir Dulles) defeats HAL 9000, the supercomputer that conspired to take over the humans’ spaceship, he receives a signal from the monolith on Jupiter. Bowman travels toward the monolith only to be captured by a vortex of light.

Rather than finding himself in a sort of Gravity situation, which viewers could much more easily understand (we all know that a human left adrift in space would just perish among the glowing stars and big, black holes of nothingness), Bowman winds up in a bedroom. He watches his older self eat his final meal and die in the bed. Bowman becomes one with this older version of himself. After he dies, another monolith appears by his bed. He reaches for it and becomes the “starchild,” a glowing fetus that is transported by float beside planet Earth.

“Now where did the bedroom come from? My intuition is that it came out of Kubrick's imagination; that he understood the familiar bedroom would be the most alien, inexplicable, disturbing scene he could possibly end the film with. He was right. The bedroom is more otherworldly and eerie than any number of exploding stars, etc.,” Ebert writes by way of explanation.

It’s quite the trip.

Soylent Green (1973)
Starring: Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young
Directed by: Richard Fleischer
Written by: Stanley R. Greenberg

Soylent Green is PEOPLE.

Altered States (1980)
Starring: William Hurt, Blair Brown
Directed by: Ken Russell
Written by: Sidney Aaron, Paddy Chayefsky

Edward Jessup (Hurt) is a Harvard scientist who starts experimenting with sensory deprivation tanks. He wants to take his work further, though, so he starts working with psychedelic mushrooms — only the type he uses makes everyone who takes them have the exact same trip.

One night while tripping balls in his tank, Jessup reverts back to the state of a Simian man. He climbs out of the tank and wreaks havoc on the lab and the campus security guards. A pack of wild dogs chases him to a local zoo, where he eats a sheep for his dinner. Jessup then returns to his human form.

His experiments transform him into increasingly troubling altered states. In one instance, he’s basically primordial soup; in another, he’s a vortex of light similar to the ones in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The only thing that can bring Jessup back from these states is his wife, Emily (Brown). She starts going through these altered states with him; sort of like the ying to his yang, or the fire to his brimstone.

In Jessup’s final experiment, he becomes a sort of pre-life protoplasm. His wife is the flesh into which the protoplasm fuses, and together, they form human life. It’s through this melding that they emerge whole, and Jessup learns to value his own humanity as well as his wife (they had been on the brink of divorcing).

Videodrome (1983)
Starring: James Woods, Deborah Harry, Peter Dvorsky
Directed by: David Cronenberg
Written by: David Cronenberg

Max Renn (Woods) runs a Toronto TV station that airs sleazy shows (softcore porn; hardcore violence), but he’s always looking for the next sensational phenomenon. His coworker Harlan (Dvorsky) is responsible for pirating signals from other broadcast stations, and he picks up a show called Videodrome that he thinks is coming from Malaysia. On Videodrome, anonymous victims are brutally tortured before they’re murdered in a chamber. Then, Randy Jackson says, “A little pitchy, dawg.” (That last part isn’t true.)

Max thinks Videodrome is the future of TV and orders Halan to start pirating it for their station. He also gets Nicki Brand (Harry), a radio host, to sleep with him after she admits she’s turned on by the events depicted on Videodrome. Around the same time, a pop-culture analyst named Professor Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley), who only appears on TV but is never seen in real life, predicts that television will one day supplant human life.

Harlan tells Max that the signal had actually been scrambled, and Videodrome ’s broadcast is really coming from Pittsburgh. Nicki goes there to audition to be on the show, which Max actually believes is fake. When Nicki doesn’t come back to Toronto, Max gets in touch with a feminist pornographer (Lynne Gorman), who tells him that Videodrome isn’t fake. It’s not just a TV show, either, it’s a political movement that Professor O’Blivion is behind.

Max finds O’Blivion’s office, The Cathode Ray Mission, and discovers that it provides homeless people with shelter, food, and water as long as they watch television, which was part of O’Blivion’s vision for the future. He’s actually been dead for over a year, though, and what people have been watching are hours of video he pre-taped in the event of his demise. O’Blivion’s socio-political movement, the Videodrome, is a war for the minds of North Americans.

The means of mind control is, of course, television; namely, viewing the Videodrome TV program. The show carries a signal that gives viewers malignant brain tumors. Max, who viewed Videodrome, also starts having hallucinations during which he thinks there’s a VCR in his stomach. O’Blivion didn’t want it to be used this way, though, but when he tried to stop his partners from doing so, they killed him.

Harlan actually showed Max Videodrome in order to get him to put it on the air as part of a government conspiracy to eradicate North America of homeless people. They insert a tape into the VCR in Max’s stomach (which has become real) that makes Max murder his coworkers. When he’s about to kill Professor O’Blivion’s daughter (Sonja Smits), who’s trying to stop the government’s plan to eliminate the poor, she’s able to reprogram him to instead kill Harlan, who’d been part of the government conspiracy to put Videodrome on the air.

Max shoots Harlan, then runs to an abandoned harbor. Nicki shows up on a television, saying that in order to completely defeat Videodrome, he has to "leave the old flesh behind." On the same television, we see Max shooting himself in the head. The set explodes, but when it does, it leaves behind bloody, human intestines. We then see Max, who watched the version of himself on TV shoot himself, do the same thing.

Jacob’s Ladder(1990)
Starring: Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Peña, Danny Aiello
Directed by: Adrian Lyne
Written by: Bruce Joel Robbin

The movie starts during the Vietnam War, where an American soldier named Jacob (Robbins), loses most of his unit during an attack. He runs into the jungle and gets stabbed by a bayonet.

When he wakes up four years later, he’s on the subway in New York City reading Albert Camus' The Stranger. Jacob is living with his girlfriend Jezzie (Peña) in Brooklyn, but he remembers having a wife and three sons, the youngest of which died before the war.

Jacob keeps having disturbing experiences and seeing demons everywhere, until he’s contacted by a comrade from his old unit who went catatonic during the attack in Vietnam. The comrade recovered and is now living in NYC, but he's killed when his car explodes. At his funeral, the surviving members of Jacob’s platoon say that they’ve all been having horrible experiences.

They hire a lawyer to investigate what happened to them, but after he reads their military files that say the platoon was never actually in combat, and that the soldiers had been discharged due to psychological reasons, he backs out of the case.

All of Jacob’s comrades stop pursuing the case, but he continues his search for the truth. This gets him thrown in a car and taken to a hospital, where doctors tell him that he’s already dead.

When Jacob leaves the hospital, Michael Newman (Matt Craven), the man who treated him back in Vietnam, confesses that he was a chemist who had designed “the Ladder,” a drug that triggered aggression. A large dose had been given to Jacob’s unit, and they had actually attacked one another. Jacob recalls being bayoneted in the jungle, only this time he can see an American soldier wielding the bayonet.

Now that he knows what truly happened, Jacob feels at peace. He returns to his family’s apartment, where he sees his dead son Gabe at the bottom of the stairs. Gabe takes his hand and leads him up the stairs towards a bright light. In the final scene, Jacob is in a triage tent, where military doctors declare him dead.

The Usual Suspects(1995)
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Gabriel Byrne, Chazz Palminteri
Directed by: Bryan Singer
Written by: Christopher McQuarrie

While being questioned about his role in a gun battle and drug bust gone wrong, Roger “Verbal” Kint manages to convince police that he should be let off scot-free. After he leaves the station and drops his limp, his interrogators look around the room and realize that the story Verbal concocted was based entirely on objects and names he glimpsed around the room.

Kint is actually Keyser Söze, the mastermind behind the whole scheme that led to the firefight on the ship. As he says, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.”

Cube (1997)
Starring: Maurice Dean Wint, Nicole de Boer, Nicky Guadagni, David Hewlett, Andrew Miller
Directed by: Vincenzo Natali
Written by: André Bijelic, Graeme Manson, Vincenzo Natali

Imagine five prisoners being stuck inside a constantly shifting, intricately booby-trapped, complexly mathematical Rubik’s Cube. They have no idea how they got there. They think they need to somehow escape in order to survive.

That’s what Cube is about, except in the end, the sole survivor ascends into a bright light. So, is the cube purgatory? A classic prisoner’s dilemma? Cube will give you a lot to think about.

The Sixth Sense(1999)
Starring: Bruce Willis, Hayley Joel Osment
Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Written by: M. Night Shyamalan

A child psychologist named Malcolm Crowe (Willis) and his wife (Olivia Williams) return home from an event where he was being honored. A former patient of Crowe’s is waiting in their bathroom. He shoots Crowe and then kills himself.

The movie cuts to the following autumn, when Dr. Crowe starts working with 9-year-old Cole Sear (Osment), who claims he can see dead people and also has trouble in social situations. Malcolm works with Cole to develop his gift for communicating with the dead, but the doctor grows increasingly distant from his wife. They never talk anymore.

Eventually, Malcolm realizes what happened. He was actually killed the night he was shot. He hasn’t been able to leave the land of the living because he wants to let his wife know that she never came second to his work, and that he also can’t forgive himself for failing to help the patient who killed both Malcolm and himself. Cole really does see dead people.

Fight Club (1999)
Starring: Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter
Directed by: David Fincher
Written by: Jim Uhls

The first rule of fight club is, of course, that you don’t talk about fight club. The second rule is that you disregard that one for the purposes of this roundup, with apologies to David Fincher and Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the novel upon which the film is based.

In this nihilistic tale, an unnamed insomniac office drone (Norton) meets a rebellious soap-maker named Tyler Durden (Pitt) on a plane. The two move into a dilapidated house on the edge of town and start an underground fight club that turns into a nation-wide organization called Project Mayhem, which protests capitalism and corporate organizations.

Eventually, the narrator realizes that Tyler Durden is merely a dissociation of his own personality. He discovers that as Tyler, he’s been plotting to destroy credit card companies by blowing up their office buildings. The narrator finally shoots himself in the cheek, killing his projection of Tyler. The film ends with the narrator and his sort-of girlfriend Marla (Bonham Carter) watching the city fall to the Pixies' “Where Is My Mind.”

Memento (2000)
Starring: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Ann Moss, Joe Pantoliano
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Written by: Christopher Nola, Jonathan Nolan

Leonard Shelby (Pearce) suffers from anterograde amnesia, which means he can’t create or store new memories. This is making it difficult to track down the man he’s certain raped and murdered his wife (Jorja Fox). To make things even more confusing, the film is told through black-and-white and color sequences, and it’s not clear to the audience which come first chronologically. It’s also unclear which characters Shelby can trust — or if he’s even trustworthy himself.

Session 9 (2001)
Starring: David Caruso, Peter Mullan, Stephen Gevedon, Josh Lucas
Directed by: Brad Anderson
Written by: Brad Anderson, Stephen Gevedon

This movie was filmed in a real mental hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts, which just adds to the authentic, chilling vibe you’ll have while watching. An asbestos removal crew (Caruso, Mullan, Gevedon, Lucas, Brendan Sexton III) is tasked with cleaning an abandoned mental hospital. While on the job, they discover a box that contains tapes of nine interview sessions with a patient named Mary Hobbes.

Hobbes has dissociative identity disorder, and she has three personalities besides her own. Of these, she only displays two of them — “the Princess,” who is childlike and innocent, and Billy, who is protective and childlike. Hobbes’ third personality, Simon, is so hidden that the Princess doesn’t know anything about her, and Billy is afraid of him.

Everything starts to unravel when one of the men goes missing, and the ninth session tape is cut short, so they don’t know what happened with Mary, the Princess, Billy, and Simon. Eventually, it’s revealed that there might not be a Mary, and that Simon actually lives inside one of the men tasked with cleaning the asylum, and some members of the cleaning crew aren’t even real — they’re projections of his imagination. He murders some of the real men, though, because of course this movie is terrifying.

Mulholland Drive (2001)
Starring: Naomi Watts, Laura Harring
Directed by: David Lynch
Written by: David Lynch

This one’s kind of tough to explain in a simple plot synopsis, especially since there’s been so much debate about whether or not the first half of the film is actually a dream sequence. This October 2001 Salon article provides a thorough analysis of not only the film’s plot, but also what the fuck it all means. Or at least what the writers think it means, because they’re still unable to explain things like the mysterious box.

Lynch originally wrote Mulholland Drive as a television pilot for ABC. Therefore, there might actually be some storylines in the film that leave questions left unanswered, since Lynch would have been able to get to them in the longer time that a TV series allots for storytelling.

In this January 2002 article from The Guardian, however, five top film critics couldn’t come to a consensus as to whether or not the film was divided into two halves, with one being a dream and one grounded in the reality of what actually happened when Diane (Watts) put a hit on her girlfriend Camilla (Harring). Diane’s actions drive her to commit suicide.

Still, the film might be intended as a larger commentary on how Hollywood places women in boxes, only allowing ingénues to look one way, while women become disposable and easily replaceable when they reach a certain age. That might just be the most important mindfuck Mulholland Drive gives to viewers.

Donnie Darko (2001)
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore
Directed by: Richard Kelly
Written by: Richard Kelly

A high school student named Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is woken up by a monstrous rabbit who calls himself Frank. The rabbit leads Donnie outside and says the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. When Donnie returns home, he discovers that a jet engine crashed into his bedroom while he was out with Frank.

When Donnie describes Frank to his therapist (Katharine Ross), she tells his parents that he’s suffering from daylight hallucinations, which can be symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. Donnie confesses to flooding his school and burning down a motivational speaker’s (Patrick Swayze) house.

Finally, it’s the day Frank prophesied the world would end. A vortex forms above the Darko house while Donnie is driving in the nearby hills. He watches an airplane fall from the sky. The events from the last 28 days start to replay in reverse chronological order. When they reach day 1, Donnie is back in his bed, laughing maniacally as a jet engine crashes into his room. Donnie dies instantly.

When he dies, all of the people with whom Donnie Darko interacted during the last 28 days start to wake up with disturbed looks on their faces. Characters who met and interacted during the course of the movie revert to being strangers, although they feel as though they know each other. They just can’t remember where or when they might have met.

Vanilla Sky(2001)
Starring: Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz
Directed by: Cameron Crowe
Written by: Cameron Crowe

Roger Ebert described Vanilla Sky perfectly in December 2001, “ Vanilla Sky, like the 2001 pictures Memento and Mulholland Drive before it, requires the audience to do some heavy lifting. It has one of those plots that doubles back on itself like an Escher staircase. You get along splendidly one step at a time, but when you get to the top floor you find yourself on the bottom landing. If it's any consolation, its hero is as baffled as we are; it's not that he has memory loss, like the hero of Memento, but that in a certain sense he may have no real memory at all.”

Vanilla Sky plays not only with linear structure, but with mixing dreams and reality, forcing viewers to question what’s real, what’s not, and whether or not reality is entirely subjective and surreal. It’s best to watch it rather than read a plot summary, really, but know that Tom Cruise jumps off a building at one point, and not in his usual badass Mission: Impossible type of way.

Oldboy (2003)
Starring: Choi Min-sik, Kang Hye-jung
Directed by: Park Chan-wook
Written by: Hwang Jo-yoon, Im Joon-hyeong, Park Chan-wook

Business man Oh Dae-su (Min-sik) is arrested for drunken and disorderly behavior in 1988. He misses his daughter’s 4th birthday because he is in jail. While his friend who picks him up from the police station is talking to Dae-su’s wife, he is kidnapped.

Dae-su is imprisoned with no human contact for 15 years in a hotel-like prison. He’s sometimes gassed with a mind-altering drug. Dae-su shadowboxes to pass the time. He has no contact with his captors, nor does he ever learn the reason for his kidnapping.

Fifteen years later, Dae-su is released onto a rooftop. His captor gives him a suit and some money, but he also calls and taunts him. Dae-su then befriends a young chef named Mi-do (Hye-jung), who takes him to her apartment after he collapses at her sushi restaurant.

Dae-su wants to track down his daughter, but all he can find out is that she was adopted by a Swedish couple. He turns his attention to his captor’s identity. He finally learns that his name is Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae). Woo-jin gives Dae-su an ultimatum: If Dae-su can figure out why Woo-jin kept him captive in the next five days, Woo-jin will kill himself. If Dae-su doesn’t succeed in finding out, Woo-jin will have Mi-do — with whom Dae-su has begun an emotional and sexual relationship — killed.

Dae-su remembers that he and Woo-jin went to the same high school, and that he saw an incestutous encounter between Woo-jin and his sister Soo-ah. Dae-su spread the rumor about their relationship around the school, not knowing they were related. Soo-ah committed suicide after the rumor made the rounds.

Dae-su admits to Woo-jin that he drove his sister to commit suicide. Woo-jin tells Dae-su that his revenge has been meticulous and carefully plotted. First, he captured Dae-su and kept him in prison for 15 years, periodically administering hypnotic drugs. Then, he planted the false evidence that Dae-su’s daughter had been kidnapped by a Swedish couple. In reality, Dae-su’s daughter is none other than Mi-do. Woo-jin drove Dae-su to commit incest with his own daughter, and he plans to tell Mi-do what has happened as well.

Dae-su begs Woo-jin to spare Mi-do from learning this information. Dae-su cuts out his tongue to show that he will never convey this information, or any other secrets, himself. Woo-jin says he will heed this request, leaves, and shoots himself.

Dae-su goes to a hypnotist to have the memories of committing incest with his daughter erased, but afterward, Mi-do finds him and tells him she loves him. He smiles when he hears this, but then his smile is replaced by a pained expression, as if he’s remembering what he went to the hypnotist to forget.

The Machinist (2004)
Starring: Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh
Directed by: Brad Anderson
Written by: Scott Kosar

A machinist named Trevor Reznik (Bale) is suffering from severe insomnia and has become extremely emaciated. Trevor is also troubled by mysterious Post-It notes that appear on his fridge, which have a game of Hangman on them. It starts to affect his work to the point where one of his coworkers (Michael Ironside) loses his arm in a machine accident. His coworkers blame Trevor for the accident, but he blames a mysterious new machinist named Ivan (John Sharian) that only Trevor seems to know about.

Trevor does have some brief moments of relief. He spends time with Stevie (Leigh), a prostitute, who enjoys his company. He meets a waitress named Maria (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) at the airport diner he frequents and takes Maria and her son Nicholas (Matthew Romero) to a carnival. At the carnival, though, Nicholas has a seizure in a funhouse.

Trevor thinks all of these mysterious events are part of an elaborate plot to drive him insane. His life begins to fall apart even more: He explodes at a coworker and gets fired. He doesn’t pay his utility bill, and the electricity in his apartment is turned off. He thinks blood is seeping out of his freezer.

Trevor thinks that Ivan is the source of his problems, so he goes to the DMV to track him down using his license plate number. They refuse to give it to him, so he goes to the police, saying that he was a victim of a hit and run, and that Ivan was the perpetrator. When Trevor gives the police Ivan’s license plate number, they tell him that the car to which that plate matches is registered to Trevor, not the mysterious Ivan.

Eventually, Trevor pieces together the details of what happened. There is no Maria, nor is there a Nicholas. He was the one who hit a boy who looked identical to Nicholas a year ago — which his mother (who looked exactly like Maria) witnessed — and then drove away. At the time, Trevor looked much healthier. The guilt over the hit and run is what led him to his current emaciated, insomniac state. The mysterious Post-It notes have actually been coming from him (he’s been dissociating), and the hangman game spells out “KILLER.”

The movie ends with Trevor going to the police to confess his crime. They lead him to a cell, and he falls asleep for the first time since the accident.

Primer (2004)
Starring: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden
Directed by: Shane Carruth
Written by: Shane Carruth

Primer is considered one of the most confusing movies of all time. People have even mapped out the various timelines in an attempt to explain the plot. Writer/director/star Shane Carruth has a degree in mathematics and is a former engineer, so the film delves into complex temporal anomalies.

Two engineers named Aaron (Carruth) and Abe (Sullivan) create a person-sized box in which a human can travel through time. They try to carefully map out rules for their time traveling to avoid meeting their past or future selves and messing up the past, present, or future.

Abe and Aaron’s different personalities lead to confrontations over how they should use the box and the way in which their collaboration in the experiment should play out. They try to use their time traveling ability to make profitable stock trades, but their future selves keep appearing in their present timelines, causing increasingly escalating problems in their lives. They also cause trouble in other people’s lives; for example, Abe’s girlfriend Rachel (Samantha Thomson) almost gets shot.

During an epilogue, it’s revealed that multiple versions of Aaron still exist, and at least one future version is colluding with the original one. Abe, on the other hand, wants to keep his present self in the dark about what Future Abe knows. In the final scene, Aaron is directing the construction of a warehouse-sized box.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind(2004)
Starring: Kate Winslet, Jim Carrey
Directed by: Michel Gondry
Written by: Charlie Kaufman

Joel (Carrey) and Clementine (Winslet) meet on a train from Montauk to Rockville Centre on Long Island, New York. What they don’t know is that they’ve met before. They were even in a relationship before, but Clementine hired a firm called Lacuna, Inc., to erase her memories of their relationship after a fight, and when Joel heard about this, he decided to do the same.

Joel doesn’t want Clementine to be erased from his memory, though, and he struggles to preserve the moments they had together by hiding them deep in his subconscious. The last thing he can remember her saying is to meet him in Montauk.

After they meet again on the train, they discover their Lacuna records. Even though they know they dated, broke up, and had their relationship erased from their minds before, they decide to give it another chance.

Atonement (2007)
Starring: Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Saoirse Ronan
Directed by: Joe Wright
Written by: Christopher Hampton

This adaptation of Iwan McEwan’s novel of the same name earns a spot on the mindfuck movies list simply because of how it completely rips the rug out from under you at the end. There you are, thinking Briony (played by Ronan at 13, Romola Garai at 18, and Redgrave as an older woman) is writing this story to atone for her huge lie, and there's going to be a romantic, happy ending. That lie being how she falsely accused Robbie Turner (McAvoy) of raping Briony’s visiting cousin Lola (Juno Temple), which completely ruined not only his life, but that of her sister Cecilia (Knightley).

The incident tears Briony and Cecilia’s family apart, because Cecilia stands by Robbie; knowing he’s been falsely accused. Years later, Briony describes visiting Robbie and Cecilia, who are now married, to apologize. Cecilia says she can never forgive her, while Robbie demands Briony tell both her family and the authorities what really happened. Even if Briony were to tell the authorities; however, nothing could be done, because Lola actually married her rapist (Benedict Cumberbatch).

Decades pass, and Briony is now an author. Her final novel (she is dying of vascular dementia) is called Atonement. She gives an interview about the book in which she reveals that it’s only semi-autobiographical. While most of the beginning is true to life, the part where she visits Cecilia and Robbie is fabricated. Briony was never able to visit them to ask for forgiveness because they never met again after Robbie left to fight in World War II. He died at Dunkirk, and Cecilia died shortly after during The Blitz. Oh cruel, cruel fate.

Triangle (2009)
Starring: Melissa George, Michael Dorman
Directed by: Christopher Smith
Written by: Christopher Smith

Jess (Melissa George) goes on a boat trip with a group of friends. The boat capsizes in a storm, and the group survives by climbing on the upturned vessel. They spot an ocean liner and board it, only to find it deserted. Jess experiences a flash of déjà vu once on board the ship, and she also gets the feeling that there’s someone else there.

One by one, the members of the group begin to die. Some of them are shot by a mysterious masked shooter, who then chases Jess, but she’s able to push the shooter overboard.

After everyone in her group dies, and Jess is left alone, she hears yelling. She sees herself and the others alive again. They’re standing on the capsized boat in the same position they were in before they boarded the ocean liner. Jess realizes that she’s stuck in a time loop, and she’s actually the figure on the ship who killed her friends.

Inception (2010)
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Written by: Christopher Nolan

Dominick Cobb (DiCaprio) and his team enter the dreams of executives to steal corporate secrets. In the big heist depicted in the movie, the team has a new type of challenge: plant an idea into a CEO’s (Cillian Murphy) subconscious, which the businessman (Ken Watanabe) tasking them with the job calls inception.

Cobb is also struggling with guilt over the death of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), who committed suicide after the two spent 50 years in a shared dreamscape and couldn’t distinguish between dreams and reality when they woke up. Cobb’s guilt causes problems with his team’s current mission, because he keeps projecting Mal into dreamscapes.

As the team travels into deeper and deeper levels of the dream labyrinth architected by Ariadne (Page), there’s more room for error, which obviously occurs. After Inception came out, people spent hours trying to map out the various levels of the dream landscapes into which the team traveled. Finally, Christopher Nolan released his hand-drawn version of the map to help viewers understand.

Audiences were also confused by the film’s ending. The movie’s last shot is of Cobb’s totem — an object the dream-invaders use to determine if they’re still in a dream or back in reality — a spinning top. If the top keeps spinning, he’s probably stuck in someone else’s dream. If it stops, he’s back in reality. Inception ends before we can see what happens to the top. Does it keep spinning, or does it fall?

Nolan finally explained the ambiguous ending during the commencement speech he delivered to Princeton’s class of 2015. He said it didn’t matter if Cobb was awake or dreaming, because he’d been reunited with his children, which is all he really wanted. “He was in his own subjective reality. He didn’t really care any more, and that makes a statement: perhaps, all levels of reality are valid,” Nolan said.

Black Swan(2010)
Starring: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Vincent Cassel
Directed by: Darren Aronofsky
Written by: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John J. McLaughlin

Nina Sayers (Portman) has spent her entire life striving to be a perfect ballerina. It’s an obsession fueled by her stage mother (Hershey). When Sayers is cast as the White Swan in her company’s upcoming production of Swan Lake opposite a more easygoing newcomer (Mila Kunis) as the Black Swan, she begins to have a complete mental, emotional, and physical breakdown.

Holy Motors(2012)
Starring: Denis Lavant, Édith Scob, Élise L'Homea
Directed by: Leos Carax
Written by: Leos Carax

Monsieur Oscar (Lavant) appears to be a regular businessman until he enters a limo in the morning after having breakfast with his wife and children. Once in the car, he receives a dossier from his driver, Madame Céline (Scob), and takes off his banker disguise. He puts on a different costume; now, Oscar is an elderly beggar who walks the streets of Paris, asking for money.

Oscar is actually an actor, but his roles exist in the real world. Throughout the day, he returns to the limousine for more assignments from Céline. These take him everywhere from a motion-capture studio to a high-fashion photoshoot with a top model (played by Eva Mendes).

Even when Oscar gets physically injured while in character, he’s unscathed when he returns to the limo. At times, he interacts with characters that look identical to ones he played earlier in the day. Towards the end of the day, he meets a woman named Léa (L'Homea), who calls him “uncle.” Oscar pretends to die, and Léa cries.

At this next appointment, Céline pulls the car up next to an identical limo. Inside is a woman named Eva (Kylie Minogue), with whom it’s implied Oscar actually has a child. However, Eva appears to be an actress like Oscar, and she tells him that she has an appointment. She’ll be stepping into the role of a flight attendant who spends her final night in an empty building with a man. Oscar leaves the building so that Eva can meet up with the man, but he then sees the two jump to their deaths. Oscar cries as he runs past their bodies and gets in the limo.

At his last appointment, Céline hands Oscar a dossier saying that he’ll be going to “your house” to meet up with “your wife” and “your daughter.” When he goes inside; however, his wife and child are actually chimpanzees.

Now that the day is over, Céline takes the limo to the Holy Motors garage, which is filled with many limousines of the same make and model. She leaves for the night after covering her face with a mask. After Céline is gone, the cars start talking to each other, worrying about becoming obsolete.

Upstream Color (2013)
Starring: Shane Carruth, Amy Seimetz, Thiago Martins
Directed by: Shane Carruth
Written by: Shane Carruth

Yup, it’s another Shane Carruth mindfuck masterpiece. In this one, a man called the Thief (Martins) kidnaps Kris (Seimetz) at a nightclub and drugs her. He keeps her in a hypnotic state of distraction, using techniques like getting her to transcribe Henry David Thoreau’s Walden on a paper chain. The Thief starves Kris so that he can infect her with a type of live larva that he harvests from blue orchids. He also manipulates her into liquidating her home equity and giving him the money.

When the Thief drops Kris off at her home, she wakes up ravenous with roundworms crawling under her skin, which she tries to remove with a kitchen knife. She fails at this.

A man called the Sampler (Andrew Sensenig) lures Kris to his farm so he can transfer the roundworms from her body a young pig’s. Again, Kris wakes up with no memory of what has happened to her. When she gets home, she sees the blood on her sheets from when she tried to remove the worms. Scared, she calls the police, but she hangs up because she’s not sure what she would tell them happened. Kris tries to return to work, but she gets fired after her unexcused absence. She tries to buy food at the grocery store, but the Thief has stolen all of her money.

One year later, Kris encounters a man named Jeff (Carruth) on a train, and the two have an almost telepathic connection. When they spend the night together, they realize they have identical scars — they were both infected by the larva and then had the roundworms removed, but they also have no memory of this happening. Like Kris, Jeff also had his personal funds stolen by the Thief. He then lost his job after trying to embezzle money from his brokerage firm to cover his tracks.

Kris and Jeff also have a telepathic connection with the pigs that received their worm transfusions, although they don’t know this. That’s another part of the worm-pig-orchid cycle, as Shane Carruth calls it. The Sampler is able to check in on people who are telepathically connected with the pig’s lives, and he writes songs about them. He sells these songs through a company called the Quinoa Valley Rec. Co.

When one of the pigs gets pregnant, Kris thinks she's pregnant. The doctor tells her she isn’t; she actually had endometrial cancer, which was removed, and is now infertile. When the pig gives birth, the Sampler throws her piglets into a sack, which he tosses into the river.

This sends Kris and Jeff into a deep depression. They turn against everyone else in their lives and hunker down in Kris’ house, expecting the worst. While this is happening, we see the sack with the piglet’s corpses, from which a blue substance — the same blue as the orchids the Thief extracted the larva from in the beginning — is traveling upstream into the surrounding waters. Orchids are growing out of the water, and farmers are collecting the blue flowers to sell.

Kris, Jeff, and the Sampler slowly start to remember the things that have happened to them. Kris starts mumbling Walden. In a dream, the three of them sit down together and discuss being aware of each other before the Sampler has a heart attack. Back in reality, Kris and Jeff are on the pig farm. She shoots the Sampler, and he dies.

Kris and Jeff find records of everyone who has been drugged the way they were and get them to come to the farm by sending them copies of Walden. They remodel the farm and start providing a better life for the pigs. No more pigs are drowned, so the Thief has no more blue orchids from which to get larva and start the worm-pig-orchid cycle again.

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After my first job MTV working as a music programmer, I can't stop trying to matchmake people with music they might like. So, I wrote a book calledRecord Collecting for Girls and started interviewing musicians. The Music Concierge is a column where I share music I'm listening to that you might enjoy, with a little context. Follow me on Twitter or Facebook, or leave me a comment below and tell me what you're listening to this week.

Willow "Boy"

There is so much to unpack on Willow's debut album (read a conversation with her about it, because it will shine a lot of light on the project). I must admit I was surprised when I pressed play, because it is so unlike anything else happening in music right now. The string arrangements on this particular track will make it stand out on any current Spotify playlist, but the low register her voice reaches is what grabbed me. The tone of her voice is soothing, and that low key she goes for, rather than the high notes many pop divas reach for, lends both sadness and wisdom to her sound. She's also picked a prime time of year to release it, as her soul-searching lyrics just go better with the fall atmosphere. I recommend listening to the full album on this one.

Vance Joy "Like Gold"

I didn't think there would be a follow up worth caring about for Vance Joy after "Riptide." And, fair enough, putting one near perfect pop song into the universe is an achievement that many will never unlock. But damn if they haven't caught my ear with "Like Gold," which takes up the mantle of low-key banjo pop that Mumford & Sons stupidly laid down. If you like plaintive and plainspoken or have a bit of love for good old-fashioned folk music, this is the jam for you.

N.E.R.D. feat. Rihanna "Lemon"

Obviously, we need to talk about this song. I've read a lot of hot takes on Twitter that I think are getting it all wrong. A lot of people don't like it because it doesn't do what Soundcloud rap is doing now, opting instead for some old N.E.R.D. production tricks and beats we remember from the '00s. Peel down to the layer below that and it's also referencing the golden age of hip-hop from the late '80s to early '90s, when sampling and repeated sampled wordplay was the style. The other thing this track does is bring us Rihanna the rapper for the first time, and whether you think she's good at it or not is so not the point: it forces that conversation about how many women can be on the rap charts at one time. Historically, they only let you have one. So, Rihanna and N.E.R.D. are here to prove that's not true. And, by letting Rihanna do her verse and own her sexuality and gender, Pharrell and Chad Hugo are trying to make good on their history of being less than woke about feminism (shout out to "Blurred Lines," never forget). It's a lot to pack into one song, and I'm reserving judgment until I hear more from this project, but I'll take this step with them.

Stef Chura "Speeding Ticket"

Detroit doesn't sound like it used to if indie rocker Stef Chura is any indication of what's brewing under the surface of the city. Her voice has that near-but-not-quite a growl and dicey delivery in line with Stevie Nicks, but her aesthetic is all lo-fi '90s rock, like Mary Timony, Liz Phair, or Juliana Hatfield. The whole thing sounds intensely personal, less like listening to music and more like listening to your conscience whisper to you.

NSTASIA "Hell of a Time"

Good luck being anything less than charmed by NSTASIA's delightful track. When this Haitian-American singer/songwriter sings "stick with me kid," you will be locked in. There are no down moments, it's all groves here. Everything is sweet in this track, from the wavy island synths to her lilting vocals to the unwavering confidence she brings to the lyrics. Just trust me, you need this track in your life.

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Emma Stone Always Does These 5 Things & No One Has Noticed

November 4, 2017, 6:00 am
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Emma Stone is that rare breed of celeb who manages to toe the line between aspirational role model and BFF. She's the kind of girl you might go to for career advice (seeing as she's the highest paid actress in the world) and validation on a new haircut.

Sadly, the chance of tapping Stone for advice of any kind seems miniscule, so until we manage to breach her inner circle of friends, we'll have to make do with stalking her red carpet beauty looks. Turns out, there's a lot to choose from: We're talking colorful cat-eyes, throwback hairstyles, and vibrant pastel hues — and those are just three of the five trends she always has on rotation.

Looking to channel your inner Stone? In honor of the star's birthday this Monday, we've rounded up her best looks in the slides ahead.

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1. Retro Hairstyles

Emma Stone loves a good throwback moment — especially if it comes in the form of vintage curls. She's often seen on the red carpet sporting glossy waves reminiscent of the glitz and glamour of old Hollywood.

Photo: Jason Merritt/Getty Images.

A classic Hollywood wave is smooth at the root and falls into a waterfall of shiny, undulating curls toward the mid-lengths and ends. Need a step-by-step how-to? We created this handy guide to recreating the technique.

Photo: Fred Duval/FilmMagic.

2. Blue Underliner

Over the past year, colorful underliner has swept Hollywood and clearly, Stone got the memo. On multiple occasions, she's been spotted using blue eyeliner to define her lower lashline. The versatile trend can be paired with everything from purple shadow to cat-eyes.

Photo: Mike Windle/Getty Images.

Not feeling bright blue? Reach for navy instead. The shade still adds a little unexpected color without feeling over-the-top.

Photo: Jason Merritt/Getty Images.

3. Pretty in Pastel

Stone may be known for her smoky eyes (she loves a good smoked-out lashline), but the star often whips out bold colors for red carpet appearances, too — namely of the pastel variety. Here, she paired baby blue shadow with a soft peach lip.

Photo: Luca Teuchmann/WireImage.

The best part about pastel makeup? You can go as bold or subtle as you like. Here, Stone wore a swipe of matte pink shadow (we love this one) in her crease to complement her cat-eye and red gown.

Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images.

4. Creative Cat-Eyes

There's a reason everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to Alexa Chung has made the cat-eye their signature look: It's a foolproof way to instantly brighten and lift the eyes. Stone loves a cat-eye, too, but rather than stick to neutral hues like black and brown, she mixes it up by employing fun colors like turquoise.

Photo: Todd Williamson/WireImage.

This look is everything we love about cat-eyes and smoky eyes. The hazy wash of winged-out green shadow opens up and lifts, while the layer of bronze shadow on her lower lashline keeps things nice and sultry.

Photo: Chris Weeks/Getty Images.

5. Funky Updos

When Stone's not rocking retro hairstyles, she's usually mixing it up with the help of stylist Mara Roszak. From the front, this 'do looks like any old half-pony, but take a peek at the back and feast your eyes on Roszak's intricate bow-like creation.

This double-bun 'do is one of our favorite Stone styles. Separate your hair into two sections at the crown and base of your head. Then create two small buns, fastening with hair pins and elastics as you work. Finish off with some hairspray and you're good to go.

Like this post? There's more. Get tons of beauty tips, tutorials, and news on the Refinery29 Beauty Facebook page. Like us on Facebook — we'll see you there!

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Netflix Severs Ties With Kevin Spacey, Stops Production On House Of Cards

November 4, 2017, 6:25 am
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Update: After taking a few days to evaluate their relationship, Netflix announced they are ending their relationship with Kevin Spacey.

"Netflix will not be involved with any further production of House of Cards that includes Kevin Spacey. We will continue to work with [production company Media Rights Capital] during this hiatus time to evaluate our path forward as it relates to the show," a representative for Netflix said in a statement published on The Hollywood Reporter. "We have also decided we will not be moving forward with the release of the film Gore, which was in postproduction, starring and produced by Kevin Spacey."

This story was originally published on November 2, 2017.

Eight more people have detailed disturbing interactions with Kevin Spacey, whom they allege sexually harassed and assaulted employees on the set of House of Cards, according to CNN.

One person, a former production assistant for the Netflix series, told CNN that Spacey groped him without his consent while driving. Later, Spacey allegedly made another unwanted physical advance.

"I was in a state of shock," he told CNN. "[Spacey] was a man in a very powerful position on the show and I was someone very low on the totem pole and on the food chain there."

The PA said he vocalized that he was not "comfortable" with the interaction, which prompted Spacey to grow "visibly flustered" and actually leave the set. Sadly, this wasn't his first encounter with Spacey, whom he'd reported to a supervisor.

"I have no doubt that this type of predatory behavior was routine for him and that my experience was one of many and that Kevin had few if any qualms about exploiting his status and position," he said. "It was a toxic environment for young men who had to interact with him at all in the crew, cast, background actors."

Others in the crew corroborated the PA's claims, with one crew member telling CNN Spacey "would put his hands on me in weird ways" and another saying he would start "play fights with [people] in order to touch them."

These recent allegations are eerily similar to the experiences Anthony Rapp, Tony Montana, and Robert Cavazos have detailed over the past week. In the days that followed, Spacey lost his International Emmy Founders Award, and Netflix suspended production on House of Cards ' sixth, and final, season.

On Thursday, Spacey's reps confirmed to People that the actor "is taking the time necessary to seek evaluation and treatment."

If you have experienced sexual violence and are in need of crisis support, please call the RAINN Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

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13 Body Exfoliators That'll Keep Your Skin Glowing This Winter

November 4, 2017, 7:00 am
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Just when we think we've finally developed a skin-care routine for our bodies that's both effective and practical, the seasons change and throw us all off-kilter. Although the temps have been slow to shift here in New York City, we all know it's coming with a frosty vengeance. In short, now is the time to take extra precautions against a winter full of rough, dry skin.

How? Upping the ante with your exfoliating routine is key to holding on to your glow over the next few months. By sloughing off dead skin, your skin will feel softer and absorb moisture better. Win-win!

To give you a head start (because staying prepared is always a good look), our editor's have rounded up a list of our favorite exfoliators, scrubs, and body polishers. From high-end grabs to drugstore staples, here's everything we plan on using until the first sight of spring.

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If we were handing out awards for the “most Instagrammed beauty products of 2017,” Herbivore’s Coco Rose Coconut Oil Body Polish would definitely be in the running. Aside from looking pretty in your shower, the millennial pink scrub delivers on its promise of leaving skin soft, supple, and smelling great.

Herbivore Coco Rose Coconut Oil Body Polish, $36, available at Sephora.

This cult classic proves that brown sugar is, hands down, one of nature’s best exfoliants. Combined with a sweet array of essential oils, the body polish provides a subtle sheen while locking in moisture for hours at a time.

Fresh Brown Sugar Body Polish, $67, available at Sephora.

The Seaweed Bath Co. knows its stuff — even Kim Kardashian (!) is reportedly a fan. This particular scrub is formulated with antioxidant-rich ingredients such as seaweed, green tea, and coffee bean extract to instantly revitalize dull, tired skin for just under $15.

The Seaweed Bath Co. Awaken Exfoliating Detox Body Scrub, $14.99, available at The Seaweed Bath Co.

While it may be getting colder outside, this product — along with its crushed Tahitian coconut shells and premium coconut oil — will transport you straight to the beach. Don’t worry about feeling greasy: Unlike other brands, the oil is lightweight and absorbs quickly.

Kopari Coconut Crush Scrub, $38, available at Sephora.

Back in April, indie brand Frank Body released a limited-edition, coffee-based Shimmer Scrub that reportedly had over 50,000 (yes, really) people waiting in line to get their hands on it. Restocked and now with even more glitter than before, you can finally experience the hype for yourself.

Frank Body Shimmer Scrub, $38, available at Frank Body.

If glitter isn't your thing, Lush has a scrubby face and body mask that shares a similar coffee scent, but with an added twist: cocoa! Simply leave the mask on for about 15 minutes. Then while rinsing, massage to reveal smoother skin.

Lush Cup O’ Coffee Face and Body Mask, $38, available at Lush.

Reviewers of this oil-free exfoliating gel claim it works miracles to remove dead skin cells and helps clear up troublesome bacne.

Clinique Sparkle Skin Body Exfoliator, $28, available at Sephora.

Transform your Sunday ritual into a more-luxurious experience with argan oil. Josie Maran's Sugar Balm Body Scrub is made with sugar crystals sized to gently refine your skin’s texture in an argan oil balm to restore the moisture balance.

Josie Maran Argan Sugar Balm Body Scrub, $38, available at Sephora.

If we’re being real (really, really) real, our butts rarely get the love and attention they deserve when it comes to exfoliating in the shower. That’s where Anese’s popular Booty Scrub comes into play. Walnut shell powder evens tone through gentle buffing, while vitamin E and several cold-pressed oils target dryness.

Anese That Booty Tho. Booty Scrub, $28, available at Anese.

This powerful scrub uses both chemical and physical exfoliation to smooth bumps, patchy skin, and spots while reducing redness.

DERMAdoctor KP Duty Body Scrub, $46, available at Sephora.

This scrub’s primary ingredients — almond milk imported from Spain and community-trade honey — protect dry, sensitive skin from being overworked.

The Body Shop Almond Milk & Honey Gently Exfoliating Cream Scrub, $46, available at Sephora.

Shea Moisture does wonders for naturally curly hair, but the brand also carries a line of amazing bath and body products for head-to-toe hydration. This scrub is a drugstore favorite thanks to its contouring, firming, and smoothing properties.

Shea Moisture Superfruit Complex Hand and Body Scrub, $9.99, available at Target.

Bliss brings the spa to your home with this self-heating scrub blended with sea salt, rosemary, and eucalyptus.

Bliss Hot Salt Scrub, $38, available at Bliss.

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Juliana Margulies Recounts Weinstein, Seagal Brushes With Sexual Harassment

November 4, 2017, 7:45 am
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Actress Juliana Margulies shared two of her own experiences with sexual harassment, one involving Harvey Weinstein and another with actor Steven Seagal, reports Deadline.

Both instances happened early in her career, she told Jenny Hutt while a guest on her Sirius XM show, Just Jenny. The first was at the age of 23 when Margulies claims that a female casting director asked her to go to Steven Seagal's hotel room to go over a scene. After the countless women who have come forward to tell their stories of sexual harassment and assault, the "hotel room under the pretext of official business" setup is sickeningly familiar. She was told that it was between her and another actress for the part.

Margulies was initially hesitant to meet up with Seagal. "I lived in Brooklyn, and I said, 'Oh, I don’t do that. I don’t travel. I don’t have money for a cab.' And I didn’t. And I said, 'And I don’t take subways late at night.'" According to Margulies, the female casting director was very reassuring. "And she said, 'Don’t worry we’ll reimburse you. And I’m here, a woman,'" Margulies recounted adding that when she got to the hotel at 10:40 p.m. ET, the casting director wasn't there, but Seagal was. "He made sure that I saw his gun, which I had never seen a gun in real life," she said. "I got out of there unscathed. I never was raped. And I never was harmed. And I don’t know how I got out of that hotel room…I sorta screamed my way out."

When the second encounter occurred a few years later in 1996, Margulies was much warier when Harvey Weinstein requested a meeting. At this point, the actress was in her third season of ER. Margulies was promised that if she took the meeting, she would get a screen test. She was also promised that the woman accompanying her would be in the room with them. "She knocked on the door, and she was standing behind me," Margulies told the radio show host. "And he opened the door in a bathrobe. I could see that there were candles lit in the room, and there was a dinner for two. And I saw him stare at her, daggers," she recalled. Margulies explained that when she turned to the woman standing behind her, "I caught her in a shrug – like, 'What could I do?' And he looked at me, furious, and took the door and he said, 'Just wanted to say good audition.' And he slammed the door."

Throughout retelling her experiences, Margulies touched on an unsettling but important point in all of this. There were other people who were complicit. If someone knows and keeps quiet, the problem continues. Both of these women were enabling predatory behavior. "These women were leading me to the lion's den," Margulies said of the two encounters. "I swept everything under the rug, and you shrug it off like, '...That's Hollywood.' For years, we all just shrugged it off. It's not to be shrugged off."

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The Best Vegan Beauty Products You Aren't Using Yet — But Should

November 4, 2017, 9:00 am
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As evidenced by a whopping 90% increase in Google searches for the word "vegan" worldwide, veganism is majorly on the rise. Of course, it goes without saying that one of the most exciting developments for the plant devotees among us is the boom in vegan beauty.

With committed cruelty-free brands like Kat Von D already providing bold, bright, high-impact makeup without compromising the welfare of any of our furry friends, and the likes of Hourglass pledging to make every one of its products 100% vegan by 2020, it's quite a good time to champion ethical and conscious beauty — and we couldn't be more ready for it.

From high-tech skin care to nourishing hair products by way of must-have makeup, click through to see our pick of the best vegan products and vegan brands stepping up their green game right now. This is only just the beginning.

Founder Sarah Brown created Pai Skincare to address a gap in the market after finding her own sensitive skin irritated by products that claimed to be organic and hypoallergenic. Free from parabens, alcohol, phenoxyethanol, detergents, and artificial fragrance, the brand's offerings are instead formulated with luxurious, effective, non-irritating organic ingredients. The Soil Association, Vegan Society, and the Leaping Bunny have all given Pai their seal of approval — so you can feel good about stocking up on the excellent, remarkably glow-inducing Rosehip BioRegenerate Oil, a potent blend of organic rosehip fruit and seed oil that's rich in skin-regenerating omega fatty acids.

Pai Rosehip BioRegenerate Oil, £22, available at Pai

Tata Harper has changed the skin-care game, thanks to the founder's dedication to natural beauty that really works. With sumptuous formulations that are extremely effective, most ingredients are grown right on Harper's farm and blended with her Estate Grown Beauty Complex, made up of arnica, borage, alfalfa, meadowsweet, and calendula. While the products do occasionally contain honey or beeswax, the majority are 100% vegan, and the brand is PETA-, Leaping Bunny-, and American Vegetarian Association-approved. This dreamy concoction combines vitamins A, B, C, D, and E for an immediate glow, while rose geranium and calendula encourage faster cell turnover.

Tata Harper Replenishing Nutrient Complex, $125, available at Nordstrom.

This 100% natural, all-vegan brand pairs the freshest botanical ingredients with the cutest bottles and tubes our bathroom shelves (and Instagram feeds) have seen in a long time. The multi-purpose beauty balm is our go-to for just about everything: We use it to soothe chapped lips and damaged cuticles, dab it on cheekbones as a highlighter, or even layered on top of eyeshadow for that glossy-lid look.

BYBI Babe Balm, $29, available at ASOS.

This new brand, founded by two skin-care industry veterans with over 20 years of experience between them, aims to seamlessly fuse nature with science to create a fully vegan brand that delivers serious results. Champions of green bamboo, moringa seeds, clover, and pink lilac, among many other natural ingredients, Orveda prides itself on its "anti-anti-aging" approach, opting instead to embrace skin and help it reach its most gorgeous potential at any age. Our pick? The Deep-Cleansing Oil, offering 4.5% actives, 20% botanical glycerin and 68% botanical oils derivatives. Use with the accompanying kabuki for the freshest wipe-away-the-day cleanse.

Orveda Deep-Cleansing Botanical & Enzymatic Oil, $120.58, available at Harvey Nichols.

While The Body Shop uses honey or beeswax in its non-vegan products, the brand is 100% vegetarian and world-renowned for its ethical practices regarding animal welfare. That said, you'll still find plenty of vegan options among its selections, like this indispensable skin booster, which uses vitamin C-rich camu camu from the Amazon rainforest in Peru to target dull, lackluster skin.

The Body Shop Vitamin C Skin Boost Instant Smoother, $17.40 (reg. $29), available at The Body Shop.

As the name would suggest, Skyn Iceland's products are inspired by nature — specifically the unspoiled resources of Iceland. Chronic stress led founder Sarah to start the brand, which tackles everything from accelerated aging and adult acne to dryness and dullness. Our favorite from the line, which also happen to be a favorite of makeup artist Katie Jane Hughes? The double-duty peeling pads, which use an alpha-beta complex, jojoba seed extract, and white willow bark to buff away dead skin cells and reveal smoother, younger-looking skin beneath.

Skyn Iceland Nordic Skin Peel, $45, available at Ulta.

Bottles of Dr. Bronner's liquid soaps have been lining the shelves of health-food stores everywhere for decades, since the brand was founded by a third-generation soap-maker and Holocaust refugee from Germany in 1948 — and if you've seen one of them, then you've also seen Dr. Bronner's message of unity across religious and ethnic divides. Still family-owned and run, the good doctor's vision of manufacturing products that are socially and environmentally responsible has continued to thrive. Also thriving: your hair, once you add this gentle conditioning rinse to your lineup.

Dr. Bronner's Organic Hair Rinse, $9.99, available at Dr. Bronner's.

As one of the longest-standing vegan-friendly beauty brands, Shea Moisture has one of the most impressive lineups on the market, with countless hair, skin, and body products that are all organic and cruelty-free, made using entirely Fair Trade ingredients. We love this antioxidant-rich shampoo, which hydrates, protects color, and adds tons of shine.

Shea Moisture Superfruit Complex 10-in-1 Renewal System Shampoo, $10.99, available at Shea Moisture.

All of Rahua's products are cruelty-free and vegan. The brand doesn't test on animals and boasts a great working relationship with tribespeople in the Amazonian nations they work in— they source their ingredients and are paid a higher price to honor their methods of production. Our pick is the Island Salt Spray, inspired by the Galápagos Islands and made with pink sea salt to give hair a textured wave without the crunch.

Rahua Enchanted Island Salt Spray, $32, available at Rahua.

Industry veteran Carisa Janes founded Hourglass back in 2004 and has created a whole host of now-cult products since. While not all of Hourglass's products are vegan-friendly, a large selection are, and the brand has announced this week that by 2020, its beauty offering will be 100% vegan. "At Hourglass, we believe that luxury is a combination of innovation and integrity," Janes explains. "This begins with our commitment to creating cruelty-free products."

Currently, from the Veil Mineral Primer to the Ambient Lighting Powder, the brand has a huge range of cruelty-free makeup that contains no traces of animal-derived ingredients. Our favorite? The Seamless Foundation Stick. The highly pigmented creamy formula comes in plenty of shades and stays on all day, all while looking like your true skin.

Hourglass Vanish Seamless Foundation Stick, $46, available at Sephora.

Axiology serves up guilt-free lipsticks that pack a punch. All products are formulated from a blend of natural and organic ingredients, which means that the entire range is 100% vegan and palm oil-free. Plus, it donates a percentage of its annual profits to partner organizationsOrangutan Foundation International and PETA.

To add to Axiology's ethical output, the packaging is sourced from a woman-owned recycled paper boutique in Bali, where paper is collected from hotels, offices and households and boiled down and pulped to create the lipstick boxes. The lipsticks are made with good-for-you ingredients like avocado oil, orange essential oil, and elderberry extract, and there's no shortage of shades to choose from, ranging from vibrant fuchsias to burnt reds.

Axiology Lip Crayon, $26, available at Axiology.

Tattoo artist-turned-makeup mogul Kat Von D is leading the way for vegan beauty. A vegan and animal activist, the founder is committed to creating quality makeup that's completely free of animal-derived ingredients and never tested on animals. Finding replacements for traditionally used ingredients such as beeswax and carmine (red beetle dye), her loyal fanbase never needs to compromise its ethical values in the search for bold colours and flawless finishes. There are so many star products from the brand, from the Shade + Light Contour Palettes to the extensive brush range, but we're loving this new drop, a palette packed full of neutral and vibrant shades.

Kat Von D Saint & Sinner Eye Shadow Palette, $62, available at Sephora.

Nailberry's ambition is to provide a healthier manicure. Certified vegan, cruelty-free, halal, and 12-free, the brand began in 2012 as a luxury nail bar in London before launching premium polishes. Seeing customers with dry and damaged nails, the brand introduced its L’Oxygéné range, which lasts over seven days and doesn't destroy nails in the process. Our favorite new shade is this tongue-in-cheek homage to vegans everywhere.

Nailberry Viva La Vegan, $19.04, available at Nailberry.

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Kirsten Gillibrand Is Taking On Sexual Harassment In Congress

November 4, 2017, 1:00 pm
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What many people have learned after the Harvey Weinstein scandal is that sexual assault and harassment happen everywhere, not just in Hollywood. Most recently, the Associated Press spoke with four female lawmakers who allege they've been harassed by fellow members of Congress, some of whom are still in office. These stories are why Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is doing something about sexual harassment on Capitol Hill.

On November 3, the New York senator proposed comprehensive legislation that would reform the way Congress handles sexual harassment. Specifically, putting rules in place that would make it easier for the victims to get justice.

“Congress should never be above the law or play by their own set of rules," Gillibrand said in a statement. "The current process has little accountability and even less sensitivity to victims of sexual harassment."

Gillibrand's bill would overhaul the Office of Compliance, which is the office that "advances workplace rights, safety, health, and accessibility in the Legislative Branch," and currently handles sexual harassment complaints. As of now, the rules require alleged victims to go through a mandatory 30-day mediation before moving forward with their complaints. Gillibrand's bill gets rid of forced mediation and creates "a designated person within the Office of Compliance to serve as a confidential advisor for victims of harassment," according to a summary of the bill.

Her bill also includes mandatory sexual harassment training for Congress members and their staff; the ability for congressional interns to file harassments cases the same way as full-time employees do; and forces all congressional offices to publicly post information about employees' rights.

The goal of Gillibrand's bill is to "increase accountability and transparency in the sexual harassment reporting process," which is why her bill is also "requiring climate surveys to show the true scope of this problem" in Congress. "We must ensure that this institution handles complaints to create an environment where staffers can come forward if something happens to them without having to fear that it will ruin their careers," she said in a statement.

Gillibrand isn't the only female lawmaker proposing a bill that changes the way sexual harassment complaints are handled. Congresswoman Jackie Speier of California also released a bill that focuses on protecting female congressional staffers.

"Women members of Congress have power," Speier told Bustle. "They have the ability to push back. They are not going to lose their jobs or be blackballed. I’m concerned about the staff, the interns and fellows who have no power, no ability to push back, and who are fearful of losing their jobs and incomes." She added that, "Staff is just so much more vulnerable" than members of Congress. Last week, Speier revealed that she had been sexually assaulted by a male chief of staff who forcibly kissed her when she was a congressional staffer.

Former Rep. Mary Bono of California also shared her own sexual harassment story, telling the AP she endured "suggestive comments from a fellow lawmaker in the House of Representatives." The lawmaker, who still serves in Congress, once told her he’d "been thinking about her in the shower." Bono would end up confronting him and she says he did stop, but her story is not a triumphant one.

“It is a man’s world, it’s still a man’s world,” Bono told AP. “Not being a flirt and not being a bitch. That was my rule, to try to walk that fine line.” The hope is with new legislation no other women in Congress will have to feel those are their only choices when dealing with sexual harassment.

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Uma Thurman Is Seriously Angry About Sexual Misconduct In Hollywood

November 4, 2017, 2:45 pm
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After the New York Times published a bombshell exposé on Harvey Weinstein, the press has been asking most actors about the scandal. Uma Thurman, who worked with Weinstein previously, was asked about the sexual misconduct problem in Hollywood. The video of her response quickly went viral.

“I don’t have a tidy soundbite for you," an emotional Thurman, who worked with Weinstein's production company on Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill series and Pulp Fiction, told Access Hollywood. " Because I have learned — I am not a child and I have learned that when I’ve spoken in anger, I usually regret the way I express myself. So I’ve been waiting to feel less angry and when I’m ready, I’ll say what I have to say.”

Thurman's response caught people's attention after journalist Yashar Ali shared the clip. "Uma Thurman's response when asked about the flood of sexual misconduct allegations," he wrote. "Wow."

It's hard not be in awe of Thurman's response, which is so poised and controlled, while also making it clear just how much this problem hits home for her.

"The controlled rage here is incredible," Lydia Polgreen, editor in chief of The Huffington Post, tweeted.

Thurman is not ready to talk about her own experiences, but she stands with any other women who has and there have been many. More than 90 women have accused Weinstein of sexual assault and harassment including Asia Argento, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Boardwalk Empire actress Paz De La Huerta, who is the latest women to accuse Weinstein of rape.

Many of those who have worked with Weinstein have also started to tell their stories, including Tarantino, who directed Thurman in Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction. He recently admitted he knew about Weinstein for years. With her answer, Thurman also implies that she has a story of her own to tell and she will tell it when she is ready, not before.

"There’s a lot going in this response by # UmaThurman, " journalist Mikey Kay tweeted. "A lot of hurt. A lot anger. A lot of sadness. Goodness knows what she has experienced."

Thurman's reply to Access Hollywood 's question also gets at how so many people are feeling: angry that in 2017 things like this are still happening not only in Hollywood, but everywhere. In this past year alone, powerful men like Bill O'Reilly, Uber's Travis Kalanick, and political journalist Mark Halperin have been taken down by sexual harassment accusations. This past week, female lawmakers talked about the harassment they've faced from their male colleagues leading Kirsten Gillibrand to propose new legislation that would overhaul the current way Congress handles sexual harassment allegations.

"So many women can relate to this rage because we've been hurt, abused and humiliated by men in power," one person tweeted in response to comedian Jen Kirman's "Me Too" tweet in solidarity with Thurman. "Not just in Hollywood, this is society."

When Thurman does tell her story, she has support from many including Argento who tweeted, "Dear # UmaThurman may peace be with you and your soul. We need your strong voice, it truly is commanding."

If you have experienced sexual violence and are in need of crisis support, please call the RAINN Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

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The CMAs Were Wrong To Ban Journalists & Artists From Talking About Gun Control

November 4, 2017, 3:30 pm
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Sarah is an internationally published music journalist, photographer, and writer at Refinery29. She interviews bands about social issues and the industry while on tour and at festivals. The views expressed are her own.

The Country Music Association probably wasn't expecting the very public pushback they got when they released their guidelines for journalists covering their awards show this year. When it came, it was swift and fierce.

The guidelines asked journalists to avoid politically charged subjects such as the Las Vegas mass shooting, politics, and the subject of gun control as a whole. The instructions were to be adhered to under the threat of media credentials potentially being "revoked via security escort." So, they were not "guidelines" in the traditional sense of the word, but rules to direct the discourse of the evening. Country singer, and co-host of this year's CMA Awards, Brad Paisley took the CMA to task on Twitter calling the guidelines "ridiculous and unfair.”

Following harsh criticism for their restrictive press guidelines, the CMAs reversed their ban on Friday.

Artists of all genres sometimes feel the need to remain silent on hot-button issues for fear of alienating their fanbase. Following the shooting in Las Vegas, some country artists have come forward with their opinions on gun control and politics and more undoubtedly want to, on a platform as big as an awards show. To ban these topics from the conversation is heavy-handed at best, and verging on censorship at worst. This event offers an opportunity for country artists who believe in gun control to speak out about the issue. Rather than infantilizing the artists and silencing the media, an open and honest discourse should be encouraged.

Country is one of the most popular music genres in the United States, and festivals like Stagecoach, CMA Music Fest, and Taste of Country draw millions of fans each year. A little-discussed secret is that the National Rifle Association has enjoyed a successful and close relationship with the country music industry for the past decade. They have partnered in cross-promotional campaigns with massive country stars likes Blake Shelton and Luke Bryan. The Director of NRA Country told Rolling Stone in 2015, "If you poll our members, they love country music." Given this long-standing relationship, it complicates things for country artists who do wish to speak out about the subject of gun control.

Others, including CMA host Paisley, feel compelled to take the audience’s political preferences into account when they speak out on the issue. "There's pressure if you don't handle it right," country singer Brad Paisley told Rolling Stone in an interview following the mass shooting at Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas. "If you deal with it wrong, there's an enormous amount of pressure."

We shouldn’t allow the First Amendment to be encroached upon simply because a polling sample of the audience is in favor of the Second Amendment or for the sake of "comfortable conversation." Despite pressure from fans and institutions, the conversation on the intersection of gun control and country music has already begun. Within a week of the shooting, some of the NRA's biggest country music artist partners had confirmed with Rolling Stone that they were no longer affiliated with the group.

But this tragedy seems to have been a turning point for many artists and their opinions on gun control. Following the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas last month, Caleb Keeter of the Josh Abbott Band, who played the festival that weekend, spoke to his fans on Twitter saying, "I've been a proponent of the 2nd amendment my entire life. Until the events of last night. I cannot express how wrong I was." He went on to make a case for gun control expressing regret for not coming to this conclusion until he felt personally threatened by it.

Singer Maren Morris also played the three-day festival and said she was shocked by the news. "As a country music artist and someone who loves country music and grew up in it, I hope that artists become braver on their stances with it," Morris said in an interview with The Kansas City Star in response to whether her thoughts on gun control and the Second Amendment had been affected by the event. Her song, "Dear Hate," which begins, "Dear Hate, I saw you on the news yesterday," was written in response to a 2015 shooting that happened in Charleston, SC, speaks widely to the issue of gun violence in the news.

She's right: artists shouldn’t feel censored when it comes to speaking about anything outside of their own music. It strips them of their agency and right to free speech. Having an opinion and expressing it shouldn’t be perceived as an act of defiance and risk. If anything, their silence might perpetuate the idea that the vast majority of country music listeners aren’t open to talking about gun control. Times are changing, and everyone should be allowed to talk about it if they want to.

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French Women Started Their Own #MeToo Hashtag To Call Out Sexual Misconduct

November 5, 2017, 6:15 am
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Women across the globe have brought awareness to the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault through #MeToo, but French women created their own hashtag that puts more emphasis on the men responsible.

The phrase #BalanceTonPorc, which means "out your pig," became a rallying cry throughout France in the aftermath of Hollywood tycoon Harvey Weinstein's public downfall. French journalist Sandra Muller created the hashtag in a tweet describing when an executive told her: "You have big breasts. You are my type of woman. I will make you orgasm all night." It wasn't long before French women from all walks of life were also outing their pigs on social media.

#MeToo kicked off in America after dozens of women accused Weinstein of sexual harassment and assault, leading to the filmmaker being ousted from his company and expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The allegations against Weinstein had a ripple effect, as other prominent filmmakers, journalists, politicians, and chefs have been publicly accused of inappropriate behavior toward women in recent weeks.

It wasn't just women, either. Actor Anthony Rapp claimed Kevin Spacey made unwanted sexual advances when Rapp was 14, acknowledging that the influx of harassment stories and #MeToo posts encouraged him to come forward. Multiple others have since made similar allegations against Spacey, and his Netflix show, House of Cards, has halted production.

As the movement crossed the ocean, French women put their spin on the #MeToo hashtag. But unlike the American campaign, the French's language choice puts the focus on the men who target women. Because it calls out perpetrators instead of centering around victims, "out your pig" more closely resembles the smaller #HimThough movement that began to take form in the U.S., as well as encouraged women to name their abusers.

France could also soon see new legislation surrounding harassment, championed by the French minister for gender equality, Marlène Schiappa. Last month, she proposed a bill in parliament that would fine men on the spot for street harassment and catcalling.

Schiappa told La Croix newspaper, "The point is that the whole of society has to redefine what it will accept and what it will not."

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Do Wrinkle Patches Actually Work?

November 5, 2017, 7:00 am
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As a Los Angeleno who'd never heard of Northface and couldn't tell you how many points a touchdown was worth for the life of me, I felt like a bit of an anomaly when I landed in Columbus, Ohio for college. But it can't compare to how I felt when I visited after graduation, as a twenty-something Botox-loving beauty editor.

I flew back for my best friend's wedding and during the bridal brunch, the conversation with the mother-in-laws turned to anti-aging. They were in their 50s, used all-natural products, and had never entertained the idea of injections — and they looked amazing. What the hell? Is that just what you get for living a more balanced life in a place where cocktails don't cost $20 and your chance of sitting next to a masturbating man on public transportation is significantly lower?

Maybe, or maybe it's what happens when you Scotch-tape your face before bed every night. I thought it was a joke when one of the women said she'd been doing it for years, but then my friend chimed in that she, too, slept in Frownies Facial Patches. They believed it worked, they looked great, and it cost them next to nothing. I seemed to be the odd one injecting my face with neurotoxins for no reason.

Still, I didn't consider taping down my skin until recently, when a bunch of Wrinkles Schminkles packs landed on my desk the exact week I was lamenting not having booked my Botox appointment on time. It may sound vain, but those forehead lines bother me a lot, and I've done far stranger things to keep them away.

The Forehead Smoothing Kit (there are also ones for the chest, eyes, mouth, and hands) contains two 100% medical-grade reusable silicone patches designed to be worn 20-30 times while you sleep. The basic premise makes sense: Hold your skin taut for long enough, and it'll take some time for it to loosen up again — like using paperweights to make a rolled-up poster lie flat. But the brand loses me with its claim that silicone creates hydration, which brings blood flow to the surface of the skin, which stimulates collagen production. The dots don't quite connect.

As instructed, I washed and dried my face, skipped my usual nightly skin-care routine (ignoring the fact that retinol is surely more important in the long run than silicone), and smoothed the patch on. By morning, there was definitely something happening under there in terms of moisture — there looked to be condensation bubbling up beneath the patch — but when I peeled it off, my forehead looked and felt as though I'd applied one of those blurring, mattifying primers. To my delight, the lines of the night before were gone. Like, completely gone. It wasn't supposed to work that well.

Alas, by the time I'd showered and gotten dressed, the carriage had turned back into the pumpkin. A good hour, hour-and-a-half is all I got each morning for a week. It isn't nothing — pull the patch off right before a date and you'll get your money's worth for two drinks and an appetizer, or half a football game — but it won't be enough to keep me out of the derm's office. Because even though I still can't tell you what the hell a line of scrimmage is, I do know one thing for sure: The fountain of youth isn't found at Office Depot.

Wrinkles Schminkles Forehead Smoothing Kit, $30, available at Wrinkles Schminkles.

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This Dallas Reporter Is Not Here For Internet Body Shaming — & Clapped Back With Love

November 5, 2017, 7:45 am
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On Wednesday, WFAA Channel 8 News traffic reporter Demetria Obilor was the target of body-shaming from a disgruntled viewer on Facebook. Now, Obilor is fighting back and she’s got the internet on her side —  because sometimes, love trumps hate.

Earlier this week a woman named Jan Shedd posted a photo of Obilor and criticized her curves, saying she "looks ridiculous" in her dress. The original comment has since been deleted, but not before someone took a screenshot and posted it online. Soon after, the image went viral.

After receiving an outpouring of support on social media, Obilor addressed the controversy in a candid video posted on Twitter. “This is the way that I'm built. This is the way I was born. I'm not going anywhere, so if you don't like it, you have your options,” she said in the minute-long video.

The best part? Obilor, who has only been on the job in Dallas for two weeks according to NBC, made it a point to focus on all the love she’s received in light of the hate. “To the people who show love: I love you right back,” she continued.

This isn’t the first time Obilor’s had to address hate online. Back in May, while working as a traffic reporter in Las Vegas, Obilor posted the email from a man who made a racist comment about her hair and how it "must smell bad."

"Just sharing because it needs to be exposed since ppl say it doesn't exist," she tweeted. Obilor also received loads of support then as well. Who says the internet is terrible all the time?

The mean-spirited nature of Shedd’s comment struck a chord with everyone from Chance The Rapper to another woman in media, The View co-host , Meghan McCain. Check out some of the internet love Obilor’s received on Twitter below.

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