Admission: $1. (Sim-n del Desierto). "In place of Hamlet's 'I must be cruel only to be kind,' Bu-uel seems to say, 'I must be cruel, mon semblable, mon fr?re.' His treatment of the temptations of St. Simon Stylites, who spent thirty-seven years atop a sixty-foot column, demonstrates, as Jackson Burgess put it, 'The moral serenity which can grant to the most depraved, the most wretched human being its humanity. Even a saint.' This excruciating serenity allows Bu-uel to make exhilaratingly blasphemous jokes, gags, diabolically trenchant points about contemporary society. A version of the descent into hell, epiphanies, miracles, the carnal, the community of sinners and saints (appear) in visions that are above and below establishment Christianity." --William Nestrick