Easier to admire than it is to sit through, the French film 13 (Tzameti) is an exercise in stylish depravity that may one day be viewed as the debut of a great filmmaker.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 19, 2007

A tightly screwed shocker, a suspense tour de force that proceeds through a harrowing chain of events with alarming confidence.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 19, 2007

It may be smarter than Saw II or Saw III, but it's just selling a classier brand of sadistic voyeurism.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 24, 2006

The Georgian-born French director Gela Babluani makes an absorbing debut with this black-and-white thriller.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 13, 2006

Gela Babluani, according to the film's sparse press kit, is only 26 years old but already knows more about suspense than some filmmakers learn in a career.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 29, 2006

The Babluanis are brothers to pay attention to.

| Original Score: B | Sep 21, 2006

13 (Tzameti) might seem allegorical, but it's too cynically concerned with what works as entertainment to offer larger truths about human existence.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Sep 8, 2006

[Babluani] creates a fear so bottomless, a bad dream so plausible that its hooks tear into your consciousness.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 7, 2006

The film is exquisitely simple, and exceptionally tough, and its monochromatic visuals -- and cast of fascinating, hard-bitten faces -- make it impossible not to watch, even when events become close to unbearable.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 1, 2006

The first film by a 26-year-old director (Gela Babluani) that feels like the worst of what a 26-year-old director could make.

| Aug 25, 2006

Demands to be seen for the juice it manages to wring out of its central gambit but mostly for the directorial career it hints is on the horizon.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 25, 2006

Get the picture? I didn't.

Full Review | Aug 23, 2006

... little substance and lots of fashionable cynicism.

| Aug 12, 2006

Although it's likely too stark for everyone, 13 Tzameti offers a mind-blowing experience for anyone willing to go along for the ride.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 10, 2006

That calmness -- and the work of both Babluani brothers is weirdly stilled and mature, already devoid of the need to show off -- serves only to thicken the horror.

Full Review | Aug 7, 2006

French art thriller 13 Tzameti has a literal hair-trigger premise, yet it's so lacking in human dimensions that it creates virtually no suspense.

| Original Score: C- | Aug 2, 2006

Starts slowly but builds, Hitchcock-style, to a terrifying crescendo.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 28, 2006

The resulting jolts add up to one unforgettably surreal nightmare.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 28, 2006

13 Tzameti flaunts a grim sense of the absurd that suggests a French new wave film infected with a virulent strain of Eastern European nihilism.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 27, 2006

By the end ... audiences will need mass manicures.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 27, 2006