Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 international breakthrough Dogtooth is a bar set so high that you’d not even mind if it he never managed to leap over it again, and yet here we are: just two films later – and the director’s first film in a language other than his native Greek (it’s English and a […]

A review requested by Alex, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The line on 2010’s Attenberg, established during its 2012 U.S. release in my hearing, but possibly older, is that it is a warped and weird and delectably perverse entry into the 21st Century’s tradition of demented Greek […]

Deprived of context, the first scene of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth, winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, makes pretty much no damn sense and it is nevertheless somehow discomfiting and unnerving – and as matter of fact, context doesn’t end up mattering very much, for although we learn a […]

From among the Video Nasties In the special features of a very carefully and lovingly assembled 2002 DVD – the film’s first legitimate release in several years – director Nico Mastorakis admitted that the motivation behind his debut and most famous work, 1976’s Island of Death, was entirely financial. One year before he started making […]

The Zero Years is a fucked-up movie. I recognize that “fucked-up” is not a recognized term in film criticism, so I should probably elaborate on that a little. The opening: black screen. After a moment, there is a deep synthesized bass note. Pause. Another. Pause. The score expands a little without moving out of the […]