Critics reviews

Not all the chapters sustain this level of clarity and hilarity, and Szifrón's infusion of political subtext into the nasty high jinks still doesn't give the whole a great deal of weight. But it's vinegary fun.

The result is a funny, dark, hugely enjoyable film that made quite an impact at last year's Cannes Film Festival, despite (or perhaps because of) being such an unusual choice for the main competition: commercial, genre-oriented, a grotesque black comedy and an anthology to boot. Wild Tales ticks each of those boxes but is, above all, great cinema.

You only need to watch the film's first shot: the high heels of a woman strutting towards the check-in stall in an airport. There's absolutely no need for this shot, just like there is no need for another shot, a few seconds later, where the luggage compartment of the plane closes and the screen turns black because the camera is inside. That's nothing but the kind of exhibitionist and empty filmmaking that people mistake for creativity or virtuosity.

While it moves at a fair pace, cantering from one form of elegantly constructed mayhem to the next, Wild Tales' satire plays broad, trading in the kind of high impact, low grade aphorisms that form the domain of stand-up comedy routines the world over. The narrative glibness is compensated for by a sleek aesthetic that lends the picture a sense of propulsion and visual wit.

Each of the segments involves violence and illustrates the arrogance of the wealthy and powerful, but their moralizing is as facile as the plotting is mechanical. The deliberate pacing is calculated to underline the swerves in the script, which offers little in the way of context or characterization. Szifron's brightly lit theatrics and simplistic attitudes seem borrowed from television commercials.

Damián Szifrón's Wild Tales was the most scathingly funny movie I saw last year, and I doubt another film will surpass it in 2015... Szifrón has maintained a panoramic, perfectly acted view of psychosis born of entitlement, trauma, greed, exasperation, corruption, and romantic jealousy. He means it as a biopsy of the Argentine character. The test results are positive: social cancer.

Perhaps the best multi-story feature this reviewer has ever seen, the Sony Classics release, a nominee for this year's Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar, deserves to become a serious art-house hit in the U.S. thanks to its skill in deftly overcoming the form's usual deficits, for a result that feels as amazingly cohesive as it is relentlessly clever and entertaining.

The film's deadpan style, outlandish complications, and digressive structure reminded me of Luis Buñuel's episodic late features The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974), and like Buñuel, Szifron recognizes the potential for surreality in the mundane.

International audiences will recognize that "our country" is their country too, that we all suffer from our own rich families and traffic departments. The only danger is that a filmmaker ends up making a "globally local" or "locally global" product that, in appealing to everyone everywhere, fully belongs to, or speaks from, nowhere in particular. It's a risk that the globally sleek, eminently exportable Wild Tales just about avoids—for the most part with a reasonable degree of wild style.

The best stories, like "Road to Hell" — a cautionary tale about untrammeled road rage — are so well executed (pun sort of intended) and as narratively stripped down as a Road Runner cartoon that they make worrying over ethics seem somehow self-indulgent. The cartoonish quality of Mr. Szifron's violence has age-old appeal, of course, which is itself a moral to ponder. Notably, he is on shakier ground when he tries to complicate the stakes.

The film is nominated for this year's Best Foreign Film Oscar, and it doesn't deserve to snatch the prize from the towering likes of "Ida," "Timbuktu" or "Leviathan." Yet in its gaudy, predictable way, "Wild Tales" is enormous fun, and the consistent wit of the quiet stretches shows there's more to Szifrón than shock tactics.

Even at its most determinedly frantic, the film displays a consistently exhilarating sense of invention that reacquaints you with the pure "what happens next?" pull of good narrative, and one segment is a visceral masterpiece of short filmmaking that boils all of the project's overriding classist proletariat frustrations down to one terrifying and hilarious exertion of physical will...