CANNES FILM FESTIVAL - MOVIE REVIEWS: SOUTHLAND TALES

A year and a half after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to a chorus of boos, Richard Kelly's Southland Tales is opening tonight (Wednesday) in New York and Los Angeles and in other cities on Friday. Like Kelly's earlier film, Donnie Darko, his new one, vastly reworked since Cannes and containing numerous added special effects, is receiving mixed reviews. But most critics point out that it's also a mixed movie. Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times describes it as "a political farce, a noir doomsday chiller, a paranoid fantasy, a Saturday Night Live sketch on acid, a musical and an Alex Cox punk rock reverie." She concludes that it is hard "to remain engrossed in a film that's occasionally inspired but ultimately manic and scattered." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post simply disses it as "incoherent and self indulgent" and a "sprawling mess." On the other hand Jan Stuart in Newsday says that while the film is open to certain criticism, it "contains stuff as uproariously out-there as anything in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and as unnervingly subversive as Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate." Stuart concludes: "I don't know exactly what planet Kelly dwells on or what model of spaceship he's flying, but I'm tickled as punch to go along for the ride." Equally intrigued by the film is Manohla Dargis of the New York Times who describes it as "funny, audacious, messy and feverishly inspired." And, almost as if replying to Lumenick's comment, Dargis remarks that the film "sprawls, at times beautifully, at times maddeningly, but its ambition and pleasures remain undiminished."

14/11/2007