Recencies van critici

The dialogue in this socialist western is worthy of Cinema Novo and spaghetti westerns: “A man is judged by the bad he does, not the good”; “Whores vote too”; “We have taken a powerful psychotropic drug and you are going to die.”

Altering the context of their sources, Filho and Dornelles demonstrate the remarkable power that remains in well-worn genre tropes when employed with force and intelligence.

It’s broader in scope and crazier in its ambitions [than Mendonca’s previous films]— an expansiveness signaled by the fact that Mendonça Filho shares writing and directing duties with his invaluable production designer, Juliano Dornelles.

An ingenious mashup of American westerns and the satirical and political work that swept Brazilian cinema in the 1960s, by the likes of Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos.

“Bacurau” never wastes a chance to leave a mark on its audience. Whether the camera is taking in the beautiful steppes of the area or witnessing a battle of the wills between Braga and Kier, the viewer is always meant to be entertained and thinking. The movie is potent with rage from end-to-end.

The stakes and traps here play out through terse cycles of violence and irrationality, jolts of displacement, rebellion and retribution. Bacurau’s a work that feels like you could excavate, or wander through, forever.

An exhilarating fusion of high and low, the movie takes a shopworn premise — townsfolk facing a violent threat — and bats it around until it all goes ka-boom. Part of what’s exciting is how the filmmakers marshal genre in the service of their ideas, using film form to deflect, tease and surprise.

The film is a superb example of cinema’s unique ability to familiarize an audience with a medley of captivating faces over the course of two hours, from leading stars to background extras.

Bacurau is a fable of populist revenge, all the way down the line, and it will work for you or not depending on how you respond to that level of it.

Motivations remain obscure, and the symbolism is by turns blunt and murky, but this dystopian vision is all the more unnerving for its relative opacity—far from a one-to-one political allegory, Bacurau is a work of powerfully inchoate despair and rage.

If there is deliberate ugliness in Bacurau, it comes mostly from the invaders’ vicious assault. Yet there is also staggering beauty in the place.

Bacurau’s violence is a combination of fear and absurdity. The situation it creates is patently ridiculous and makes this silliness obvious—yet its results, seen in the gruesome bloodshed, is no less affecting. It is satire and terror in one, an ungainly mix that may not fully work, but I’m not sure it has to. It just has to communicate that something is very, very wrong.