I still reckon, as I wrote back in August, that 'Avalon' is a "love it or hate it" movie, but now I know which camp I'm in!
The only real parallels one might draw with 'The Matrix' are the questioning of the nature of reality itself — especially in a world where the "real" really hurts (there's some clever use of colour in the sepia shots of food which take on some importance here) — and the way Ishii and Itô draw on myth and legend that are pretty important to the points they succeed in making.
It deserves "cult status". It was a movie far ahead of its time and very different mind-fodder from most of the unmemorable gloss and dross that came out of Hollywood that year.
But I think it also deserves a second chance on the big screen circuit!
DVD is OK.
But it really isn't the same thing, not if you've got the devil's luck like I have to live in an adventurous art-movie paradise like Paris, where some of the best cinemas still have the committed support and audience to go on taking risks.

Also revisited in the past few days, thanks to the rental shop, and another sure candidate for my "eventually buy as part of the Top Ten list": a very different, and exceptionally moving, kind of musical film, Giuseppe Tornatore's 'La Leggenda del pianista sull'oceano' ('The Legend of 1900'; IMDb, 1998).
But that — and despite the title it's a movie in English with outstanding performances notably from Tim Roth, Pruitt Taylor Vince and an indispensably gorgeous Mélanie Thierry — is a very different story.
Some other time.

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'Avalon' photo credits: Cinévia Films;
Kenji: no credit given at source, apart from OPhoto.