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
Art film make "art films", and film critics did not use the term "art film". However, there were films that had sophisticated aesthetic objectives, such as Carl Theodor Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928) and "Vampyr" (1932), surrealist films such as Luis Buñuel's "Un chien andalou" (1929) and "L'Âge d'Or" (1930), or even films dealing with political and current-event relevance such as Sergei Eisenstein's famed and influential masterpiece "Battleship Potemkin". The U.S. film "" (1927) by German Expressionist director F. W. Murnau uses distorted art design and groundbreaking cinematography to create an exaggerated, fairy-tale-like world rich with symbolism and imagery.