In willingly sacrificing story to atmosphere and theme, the film packs a punch -- even if you can't quite say where the blow l comes from.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 26, 2019

An unusual but incomprehensible, offensive and tedious sci-fi film that depicts Russia as a place of squalor and its citizens as depressed alcoholics.

| Original Score: C+ | Apr 27, 2014

Khrzhanovsky's film, written by acclaimed Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin, looks great but has a shambolic, off-kilter feel that might not be entirely intentional, and is alternately tedious and shocking.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 5, 2013

It's another blast of vibrant, vicious, gloomy electricity from the always-surprising Russian film scene, and the beginning of an important career.

| Nov 5, 2013

This 2004 debut feature by Russian director Ilya Khrzanovsky is puzzling, intriguing, and often compelling, apparently set in the present but magical and futuristic in tone.

| Nov 5, 2013

The sheer surfeit of ideas in 4's first half hour alone could fuel a dozen warped movies; presented in this kind of rush, they leave you agape.

| Nov 5, 2013

Khrzhanovsky and screenwriter Vladimir Sorokin have both the grim ideas and the little sideways winks in perfect equilibrium in the brilliant first half hour of this strange film. The rest of the film is certainly memorable, if increasingly impenetrable.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 5, 2013

Even if its reasoning remains illogical, it amounts to a demonstration of unbridled audacity.

| Feb 7, 2012

The performances are so good and the images so darkly expressive that Khrzhanovsky's experiment with cinematic deconstructionism nearly works.

| Mar 1, 2007

A film to experience rather than understand, this bleak blend of Dostoevsky and Peter Greenaway will fascinate those prepared to surrender to its macabre absurdism.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 30, 2006

a malcontent mindbender

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 20, 2006

| Original Score: D | Sep 30, 2006

If your art film tastes lean toward orderliness and tidy metaphors, you could spend the two hours of Russian filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky's fearless and mesmerizing debut feature.

| Sep 30, 2006

Decidedly not for everyone, 4 is an incomparably unhinged act of disinterment, but it's also a fiercely willed feat of rebirth, raw and bloody and screamingly alive.

| Sep 30, 2006

This film might have been less shambolic if Khrzhanovsky had decided whether he wanted to preclude or solicit his audience's involvement.

| Sep 28, 2006

The result is a teasing, if trying, exercise.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 15, 2006

This seriously weird pic has a few flat stretches, but its bawdy comedy, bravura sound design and uncanny atmosphere will turn on auds with a taste for deeply oddball fare and baffle others.

| Aug 4, 2006

There's much in the movie that won't translate to audiences this side of the Volga, but there's also a humor and a fierce filmmaking intelligence that demand attention.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 4, 2006

A creepy, Lynchian dream-walk into the purgatory of human mass production

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 13, 2006

4 could be a gross-out phantasmagoria to test your cinematic stamina, or it could be a political commentary, though Khrjanovsky insists not.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 26, 2006