The Neon Demon of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's groundbreaking surrealist short "Un Chien Andalou" – that all you can do is howl or cheer." Tirdad Derakhshani, writing for "The Philadelphia Inquirer", called Refn a "bold visionary artist... able to revel in the culture of instant gratification while also subjecting it to critique", giving the film three and a half out of four stars and calling it a "brutal masterpiece". Rene Rodriguez of "The Miami Herald" wrote positively of the film's visuals and experimental filmmaking, writing, "To complain that "The Neon Demon" lacks substance or that it doesn't have anything to say about
Jean Painlevé actually consider himself a surrealist. He did, however, share the surrealists' interest in psycho-sexual stimulation and the ultimate weirdness of procreation. Painlevé first came to the cinema as an actor, alongside Michel Simon, and also as assistant director in the René Sti unfinished film "L'inconnue des six jours" "(The Unknown Woman of Six Days)", 1926. (Later, he would appear as "chief ant handler" in Luis Buñuel's "Un Chien Andalou", 1928). Soon, he was shooting his own films, starting with "L'œuf d'épinoche : de la fécondation à l'éclosion", 1927. Painlevé sometimes scored the music and background sounds for his films, such