One of the best things about Brand Upon the Brain! is that it doesn't set off that dreaded snooze alarm...

| May 21, 2020

It's a little spastic, a little dreamy, terribly demented. . .not unlike the director himself. It's also visually and aurally stunning.

| Aug 23, 2017

The director's form of genial cinematic dementia is guaranteed not to be to all tastes at all times, but those who are looking for something strange and different will feel right at home.

| Oct 17, 2014

It is breathlessly preposterous at times but stays clear of arch parody, allowing audiences to be unabashedly part of the antics.

Full Review | Oct 17, 2014

It's a bizarre bildungsroman cum scare flick, with Mom as the chief villain -- Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate by way of Psycho. And like so many of Maddin's films, it's oddly and uniquely affecting.

| Oct 17, 2014

Pretty darned good.

| Oct 17, 2014

[Maddin] taps a rich vein in this highly memorable and frequently disturbing homage to lost innocence and German expressionism.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 17, 2014

The Brand Upon the Brain! is a genuine work of art and not an ingenuous and ingenious joke.

| Oct 17, 2014

Of a piece with Maddin's previous, similarly themed and structured films, Brand is also new and surprising.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Oct 17, 2014

Brand may not be as satisfying as The Heart of the World or Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, but it's the first to suggest a dead-serious Maddin film may not be a bad thing.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Oct 17, 2014

The story is fervid in its outlandish obsessions, but it holds together quite well, even if it closely approximates a train teetering on the edge of derailment.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 18, 2008

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 18, 2008

If you are drawn to oddball films like David Lynch's Eraserhead, then you should feel at home here.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 2, 2008

It is almost an unintended parody of the excesses of art house filmmaking - like something that would have shown up on Dan Akroyd's old Saturday Night Live vignette "Bad Cinema."

| Jul 9, 2008

The mythic nuttiness gets under your skin just as these archetypal figures gradually penetrate each other's subterfuges, skulls, and orifices.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 1, 2007

Visually opaque and narratively enigmatic.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 1, 2007

It's weird, creepy, imaginative and unlike anything else out there.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 11, 2007

You feel like you've stumbled across a lost treasure from some studio's vaults that was meant to be buried forever.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 14, 2007

This more-than-surreal feat is swimming in winks and nods to Maddin's influences. Moments of Bunuel, Hitchcock and Lang are everywhere.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 30, 2007

Seeing is believing, and the clever Maddin understands a dimension of his medium that many of his contemporaries won't dare approach: with the right compelling images, anything is possible.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 28, 2007