Les Vampires

Supremely irrational (thereby a favorite of the Surrealists), weirdly erotic (thus temporarily banned in Paris for its glamorized violence), and the font of the crime film (therefore essential), Louis Feuillade's seven-hour, 10-part, 83-year-old silent serial Les Vampires is a masterpiece. Mathe plays Philippe Guerande, a Paris journalist on the trail of the Vampires, a secret society of criminals. Musidora plays Irma Vep, queen of the thieves. Feuillade drags the Victorian spook and kink of Bram Stoker's Dracula into modernity, uncovering, as Andre Breton and Louis Aragon put it, the ''reality of this century, beyond fashion, beyond taste.'' Make a pot of coffee, rent 1997's Irma Vep — Olivier Assayas' playful reinvention of the tale — and lose yourself in the spectacle. A+