L'Âge d'Or (French pronunciation: [lɑʒ dɔʁ], English: The Golden Age) is a 1930 surrealist film directed by Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel and written by him and Salvador Dalí. Buñuel's first feature film, it has more of a plot than his previous short Un Chien Andalou (1928), but is still pure surrealism and open to broad interpretation. The film was begun as a second collaboration with Dalí, but, by the time the film went into production, Buñuel and Dalí had had a falling out, and so Dalí actually had nothing to do with the actual making of L'Âge d'Or. During this film, he worked around his technical ignorance by filming mostly in sequence and using nearly every foot of film that he shot. It has generally been seen as a scathing attack on the Roman Catholic Church.

I loved Un Chien Andalou. Like, really, really loved. There was something about its utterly bizarre surrealism and total lack of any semblance of a plot that really struck a cord with me. So I couldn't help but be slightly disappointed by this.

Don't get me wrong, it has its fair share of wonderfully surreal imagery and truly unique moments, but it couldn't match the delicious randomness of Buñuel's earlier work. I think because it's too focused on telling a story, and subsequently mocking the Church and bourgeois society, to truly embrace its surrealist mentality. There's flashes of it, like the cow on the bed or throwing the bishop out the window, but, for the most part, it's far too concerned with making fun of stuff to actually be weird or artsy or even that interesting.

Still, it's worth a look. There's a lot of worthwhile stuff here - even if it is masked by overtly satirical material - and it's a breeze to get through. And the woman fellating the statue's toes (pictured above) is bizarrely erotic and not something you're likely to find in a film of the 30s, no matter how surreal it is.

For fans of Buñuel only, I think.

Even when Bunuel movies aren't great