Italian Marxist poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò blends fascism, de Sade (it's based on the writer's 120 Days of Sodom) and upscale art cinema into the most notorious film in the medium's history.

 

Before he was murdered in 1975, Pasolini declared that the time had come when "artists must create, critics defend, and democratic people support ... works so extreme that they become unacceptable even to the broadest minds of the new state." And he made a naughty masterpiece.