Be prepared for an experience such as you've never had from watching a film when you sit down to look at Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad."…

It may grip you with a strange enchantment, it may twist your wits into a snarl, it may leave your mind and senses toddling vaguely in the regions in between. But this we can reasonably promise: when you stagger away from it, you will feel you have delighted in (or suffered) a unique and intense experience.

And that, it appears, is precisely what M. Resnais means you to feel—the extreme and abnormal stimulation of a complete cinematic experience…. This is no lucid exposition of human behavior in terms of conventional dramatic situation, motivation and plot.

This is an eye-opening example of the use of the cinema device….

To this observer's way of thinking (which we might as well recognize right...