A black-comic poem of dysfunction, a veritable operetta of self-harm, this brilliant and bizarre film from the Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos is superbly acted and icily controlled – it grips from the very first scenes. Development does not get more arrested than this. Dogtooth (2010) could be read as a superlative example of absurdist cinema, or possibly something entirely the reverse – a clinically, unsparingly intimate piece of psychological realism. Watching this, and alternately gaping at the unselfconsciously shocking scenes of violence, thwarted sexuality and unexpressed sibling grief, I was reminded of Alan Bennett’s maxim that all families have a secret: they are not like other families. But I can’t imagine any family being quite as unlike others as this. [Read more…]
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Cinema Disordinaire is a unique selection of strange and wonderful films, along with their original reviews, which showcase the singular in all of cinema. These, subjectively speaking, are seminal if often entirely sublime little gems that have arrived on screen this past half century. For fans of off-kilter and/or confounding cinema, there's not much here you won't thoroughly enjoy.
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Winter’s Bone
In the extraordinary independent film Winter’s Bone (2010), the large Dolly clan lives off the grid. The movie is set in the Missouri Ozarks, in backcountry—way back, where the front yards are filled with dead cars and cracked toilets, and the children ride wooden horses and hunt squirrels. There are no telephones, much less cell phones or computers, and not a TV in sight. [Read more…]
Fish Tank
Mia, the 15-year-old protagonist of Fish Tank (2009), Andrea Arnold’s tough and brilliant second feature, moves with such speed and fury that she seems to be trying to flee not only from her bleak surroundings but also from the movie itself. The narrow, nearly square frame boxes Mia in, and Ms. Arnold’s on-the-run hand-held tracking shots increase the sense of panicky claustrophobia. Living in a cramped apartment in a British housing project that stands like a cluster of megaliths in the middle of nowhere, Mia is at once trapped and adrift, unable to contain or to express the feelings seething beneath the blank, sullen mien she usually presents to the world. [Read more…]
A Prophet
Near the end of A Prophet (2009), one of those rare films in which the moral stakes are as insistent and thought through as the aesthetic choices, there’s a scene in which the lead character, Malik, travels to Paris to kill some men. The scene reverberates with almost unbearable tension but is briefly punctured by a seemingly throwaway image: Seconds before he begins shooting, thereby sealing his fate, you see him catch sight of a pair of men’s shoes showcased like jewels in a boutique window in a rich Parisian quarter. He does a double take, a reaction that might mirror that of the anxious viewer who wonders why he doesn’t just get on with it. [Read more…]
Drag Me To Hell
In each of the two great movies opening this weekend, a crotchety old person faces the loss of the family home to cold, impersonal capitalism. On which film should you, the viewer, spend your hard-earned money? Well, if you think you’d enjoy seeing the elderly hero spirit away his home in an inspiring ode to adventure and friendship, you should see Up. On the other hand, if you’d rather watch the old person viciously attack a loan officer, tear out chunks of her hair and place a horrifying Gypsy curse on her soul, then see Drag Me to Hell (2009). How angry are you feeling about the economy, anyway? [Read more…]
Gomorrah
There are no colorful characters in Gomorrah (2008), Matteo Garrone’s corrosive and ferociously unsentimental fictional look at Italian organized crime; no white-haired mamas lovingly stirring the spaghetti sauce; no opera arias swelling on the soundtrack; no homilies about family, honor or tradition; no dark jokes; no catchy pop songs; no film allusions; no winking fun; no thrilling violence. Instead, there is waste, grotesque human waste, some of which ends up illegally buried in the same ground where trees now bear bad fruit, some of which, like the teenager scooped up by a bulldozer on a desolate beach, is cast away like trash. [Read more…]
Let The Right One In
The title of the spectrally beautiful Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In (2008) comes from a song by Morrissey, a romantic fatalist who would surely appreciate this darkly perverse love story. “Let the right one in,” he sings in “Let the Right One Slip In.” I’d say you were within your rights to bite/The right one and say, ‘What kept you so long?’ ” These may sound like words to live by, though in the case of a film about a boy and the girl next door who may just be a vampire, they could easily turn out to be words to die for. [Read more…]
Bronson
Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson (2008) is a highly stylized and embellished film biography of a man known as the most famous prisoner in Britain. Born Michael Peterson in 1952 and raised mostly in the city of Luton, Charles Bronson, renamed after the American movie star, has spent all but a few months of the last 35 years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement. [Read more…]
Eastern Promises
The story told in Eastern Promises (2007) is a grim and violent one, set in London’s expatriate Russian underworld. The film, directed by David Cronenberg from a script by Steve Knight, revisits a number of themes and motifs that are staples of the genre: the ties of family and culture that bind criminal organizations; Oedipal drama; honor among thieves. The audience stumbles into this realm in the company of an innocent outsider (Naomi Watts) who finds herself at once fascinated and repelled by it, as well as in considerable danger. [Read more…]
House of Sand
If anything, the title of House of Sand (2005) is an understatement. This lovely film, directed by Andrucha Waddington (Me You Them), takes place in a corner of northern Brazil that is a veritable universe of dry, swirling white dust. Like the main characters — three women of successive generations exiled from a softer, more accommodating life in the city — you grow accustomed to this landscape after a while, and come to appreciate its beauty. But at first it seems about as hospitable as the surface of Mars: gritty, windy, almost actively hostile to human habitation. [Read more…]
Pusher I & II
It’s the rare crime film that balances the vicarious thrill of rampant illegality with the real-world desperation of broken souls who are nearly always one wrong move away from a wretched end. Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy — showing this weekend at the American Cinematheque over two days — are such movies, character-overlapping slash-and-burners about underworld types who discover the pitfalls of vulnerability in their profession when it’s least advantageous. [Read more…]
The Machinist
Christian Bale’s 63-pound weight loss for his role in The Machinist (2004) may take the cake (or is it a diet wafer?) as an example of an actor’s starving for his art. To play Trevor Reznik, the skeletal insomniac who stalks through this bleak psychological thriller, this buff star of American Psycho reduced himself to a walking 120-pound cadaver. [Read more…]
A Tale of Two Sisters
Truly an exercise in internal horror, the glossy A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) could just as easily have been called What Lies Beneath. A hit in its native Korea, Kim Jee-woon’s gothic-style spooker is only too happy to keep its audience guessing. [Read more…]
Japón
After a long, dreamy car trip from the city, a haggard middle-aged man (Alejandro Ferretis) walks through a field, dotted with cactuses and scrubby trees, on the rocky edge of a canyon. He meets a group of hunters, and asks them the way to an obscure, tiny village at the bottom. Someone asks if he is going to visit family down there. ”No,” he replies, ”I’m going to kill myself.”
The production notes inform me that Japón (2002) the first feature by the young Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, whose opening I have just described, was shot in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, and also in 16-millimeter CinemaScope, a format that captures wide expanses of land and sky, as well as flickering nuances of natural light. [Read more…]
City Of God
A few minutes into City of God (2002), the narrator offers (in English-subtitled Portuguese) a pointed description of the sprawling slum outside Rio de Janeiro that gives the film its name: “There was no electricity, paved streets, or transportation. But for the rich and powerful our problems didn’t matter.” This introduction could easily have marked the beginning of a filmic diatribe about the plight of the poor in Brazil, an earnest work intended to inform but not entertain. Instead it marks the beginning of a glorious exercise in cinematic style. Yes, City of God tells a story about the hopeless, desperate denizens of a drug- and violence-riddled slum. But tells a story, and does so with a narrative panache that owes more to Scorsese or Tarantino than to any well-meaning documentarian. [Read more…]
Demonlover
The enigmatic antiheroine of Olivier Assayas’s diabolical techno thriller, Demonlover (2002), suggests a female cyber-age equivalent of the archetypal Man With No Name. Diane (Connie Nielsen), as she calls herself, is a coolly seductive industrial spy of ambiguous sexuality, with an invented résumé, who sometimes speaks in riddles. During a romantic dinner with Hervé (Charles Berling), her suspicious but lustful boss at a Paris-based multinational conglomerate, she declares: ”No one sees anything, ever. They watch but they don’t understand.” [Read more…]
Sexy Beast
At the start of Sexy Beast (2001), Gal (Ray Winstone), a heavyset, middle-aged English hoodlum, is enjoying a carefree retirement on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Yes, a boulder has tumbled into his swimming pool, smashing the tilework and narrowly missing Gal himself, but this seems more like an inconvenience than an ill omen. Gal spends his time sunbathing on his patio, dining out with his friends, Aitch and Jackie (Cavan Kendall and Julianne White), and dancing in the moonlight with his beloved wife, Deedee (Amanda Redman). He’s happy to have left England (”What a toilet!”) and the dodgy life he led there. [Read more…]
Donnie Darko
Donnie Darko (2001), the first feature by 26-year-old writer-director Richard Kelly, is a wondrous, moodily self-involved piece of work that employs X-Files magic realism to galvanize what might have been a routine tale of suburban teen angst—OK, borderline schizophrenia. Part comic book, part case study, this is certainly the most original and venturesome American indie I’ve seen this year. [Read more…]
Waking Life
There are those who will insist that the best way of approaching Waking Life (2001), Richard Linklater’s witty cosmic wow of a movie, is in a chemically altered state, and it’s easy to see why.
The screenplay for Waking Life, which the New York Film Festival is showing tonight and tomorrow at Alice Tully Hall, blithely tosses out a bouquet of theories about human consciousness — some intellectually rigorous, others ludicrous crackpot riffs — whose cumulative impact suggests a stoned-out Big Bang of human thought. [Read more…]
Mulholland Drive
By surrendering any semblance of rationality to create a post-Freudian, pulp-fiction fever dream of a movie, Mr. Lynch ends up shooting the moon with Mulholland Drive. Its frenzied final 45 minutes, in which the story circles back on itself in a succession of kaleidoscopic Chinese boxes, conveys the maniacal thrill of an imagistic brainstorm. [Read more…]