Fascinating in the abstract but wearisome in reality.

| Original Score: B | May 4, 2005

A textbook example of how a director can strip away plot, motivation, character, and meaning and still leave arrant pretension standing tall.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 16, 2004

Muddled.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jun 18, 2004

In Twentynine Palms, writer and director Bruno Dumont takes his cultural revenge on the United States, attacking countless American stereotypes and in the process reinforcing an equal number of cliches about arrogant French auteurs.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jun 11, 2004

It's alternately monotonous, hot and dramatic, which makes for a peculiar, not entirely unsatisfying atmosphere of neo -- or is that post? -- noir.

| May 28, 2004

[Dumont] forces viewers to question not only what's on the screen, but ultimately, the very nature of reality.

| Original Score: B+ | May 20, 2004

[Brown Bunny] sports the narrative complexity of War and Peace compared with Twentynine Palms.

Full Review | Apr 27, 2004

Cannot entirely be dismissed, because the director so adamantly knows what he's doing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 9, 2004

At turns sexy, ultra-violent and sweet, it will infiltrate your brain long after you've seen it.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 8, 2004

The sustained force of Bruno Dumont's vision of existence as a swirl of brute instincts may not be easy to absorb, but it marks him as a major filmmaker.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 8, 2004

Nihilism is a crude instrument, even for those with talent, and it can be especially hazardous for those who believe, as Dumont apparently does, that the sum total of existence is 'sex, love and evil.'

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 8, 2004

Over and over in Twentynine Palms, Dumont rubs our noses in every detail of this tumultuous, yet oddly inconsequential, relationship.

| Apr 8, 2004

This is one of those films in which the Act of Driving becomes a 10-minute statement of high emptiness.

| Original Score: C+ | Apr 7, 2004

A hollow and pointless exercise.

Full Review | Mar 22, 2004

Dumont is clearly fascinated by America's wide-open spaces, and much of Twentynine Palms is a love poem to the way we look at the world.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 27, 2004

A real, and uncompromising, achievement.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 18, 2004

Dumont's taste for the elemental has always flirted with the moronic. But this time, he's dozed off at the wheel and drifted well over the line.

Full Review | Dec 3, 2003