Telluride at Dartmouth: "Wild Tales"
This provocative satire, produced by Pedro Almodóvar, features six wickedly delightful tales about ordinary people pushed to their very edge.
Revenge, if not always sweet, can, in the right hands, be very funny. This wickedly delightful anthology of six narratives explores the many roads to vengeance, as the principal characters—having suffered insults and indignities, from the trivial to the very serious—go to outlandishly murderous lengths to get even. These are perfectly ordinary middle-class Argentineans, but lurking beneath their civilized exteriors are boundless waves of rage and an insatiable desire for chaos. Writer-director Damian Szifron’s provocative satire, produced by Pedro Almodóvar, enacts a savage assault on contemporary Argentine society, skewering class and gender biases with a deliciously morbid sense of humor. Somewhere in movie heaven, the ghost of Luis Buñuel smiles. (Argentina, subtitled, 2014, 122m) Courtesy of Sony Classics