With a name borrowed (with his permission) from Spanish writer José Bergamín’s unproduced play, and inspired by the apocalyptic Angel of Death, Luis Buñuel’s original script is a pitch-black satire about a wealthy group of friends who find themselves unable to leave a well-appointed living room after a dinner party. One of the director’s most inspired takedowns of the bourgeoisie, The Exterminating Angel is a tense exploration of inertia, extravagance, complacency, repetition, and mounting hysteria, and was the last full-length film he made in his adopted nation of Mexico.

Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.