More inventive in every frame than an entire Avatar: often riotously clever and gut-burstingly bold. Its unapologetic simplicity is relentless, almost a combative anti-animation, but unfortunately doesn't contribute to much more than a series of comedic scenarios, that border on boredom throughout. Which is a risk of such risk-taking, I guess: leaving your clay in lumps can lead to rather draconian formlessness.

A film so taut and fine-tuned, when woman is united with piano, the music that's made blooms like a flower through cement. It's rare to see movies this dehiscent, where the slightest aberrations from the main character--being pulled along in an excited cab, remaining in spaces she's emptied, confronted with walk-on characters that take her place--insist on cinema's radical suddenness & the power of its space.

Typical resnaisian play with brains, cinema, time & space. Just when you're ready to depart with a film about alienated souls uniting against the odds, you're pulled into a frenzy of twists & turns & airplane acrobatics that further undermine everything you've seen of an already radically subversive film. Ceaseless neuromantic voiceovers, bizarre love-decahedrons, etc: as if the french new wave were walking undead.

The first I've seen from Joon-ho, & I already sense the man is a master of theme-weaving. Technology, modern sexuality, the relationship between mother and son, economic alienation--all of these are expertly, subtly entwined beneath a gentle but tense surface, which thrills as much as it causes pause. Liquid drips from the images, they burn like fire, & are themselves handled like fabric of the highest thread-count.

I wish I hadn't seen it accompanied by an irksome, loudmouthed choral arrangement--I wish I had let the images themselves wash over me, let the juxtapositions alone shock me, drunk in the melodrama without musical cues. How radical, still: seconds before Joan's unjust desserts, a baby letting go of a mother's swollen breast to look at Joan, and then to go on drinking--mundanity of motherhood/masturbation of martyrdom

Despite the questionable choice to drain the film of its color, creating a delinquent monotone, the movie is executed in a way, I now realize, only Haeneke can: like his other films, this one too flies in face of conventional film narrative, teasing you with ideas of "resolution" and "meaning", banking nothing in historical backdrops or even images. It's severe and challenging as it slowly folds in upon itself.

Biased, read the book: the film holds nothing of Isherwood's lithe charm and restrained imagery, banking itself on slo-mo mundanities and close-up, corporal obsessions. Smoke billowing from dark, stubbled lips is only sexy because Hollywood says so, not because it genuinely is--and Ford's film, banal but for such moments, makes one reconsider the truth of his fetishes and how resoundingly counterfeit Art can be.

A terrific filmic feat, but puzzling. Once again we're left wondering what the Brothers' movie was all about anyway, whether their nihilism is anything beyond expertly constructed tantrums. The performances are phenomenal, even the most minuscule are startling to behold, nuanced and serious. Ultimately the film tries too hard to maintain this seirousness, the same somber shrug; its the cinema equivalent of a killjoy.

The drama was a touch too mellow: the subtle, patient eroticism we've grown to expect from Pedro is only manifest in a few precious images, and these too contained in their frames. Is there any metaphysical space inhabited by the lovers separated by sheets, by the giant peaches hanging in the dining hall, by Mateo reading the video grain with his hands? As if he's tossing cards at us, hoping they'll add up to a flush