Taraparain Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Siflutter It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

hanikingkong i saw this film on DVD recently without reading or looking at reviews here but stupid friend of mine said he loved the ending ,because its a horror movie (that was enough to convince me to give it a shot ) so i put the DVD in the DVD player ,and movie starts : its a long road film (not the fun type of road movies )it begins with a photographer and a model taking road trips ,and how they started their relationship in this ''lets have sex at every nice location road movie'' and i was hoping i would enjoy some scenes but apparently the model wasn't Letitia casta type of sexy model either,,there are some great locations here (a plus for good directing) ,just the first 20 mins passed and i had double thought to force myself to watch 2 hours long of unstable relationships between the two,or skip the long driving scenes through the landscape (nice jeep though),the dialogue was just kind of weird ,sex scene,then another sex scene ,then another , sex in swimming pool nice ,sex on rocks ,COOL ,adventurous sex scene almost i forgot i got a GF watching with me,yeah right,,i really thought about stop watching after 1 hour but decided to make coffee and continue ,then the last accident with 3 thugs appeared out of nowhere as they took the couple in good beat down for my amusement for putting me to boring film,but hey those guys spiced up the story out of sudden its now a got horror elements like hills have eyes moment involving in rape and assault leaving the couple wounded(that's the horror you guys are talking about ?)well,now the leading male actor pulled a Friday th13 final chapter on his girlfriend ,die die die stabbing his girl ,because his mind is unstable due to the rape so he unleash it on the his girlfriend model ,the movie ends with police arriving to bust him in the desert the end,so i asked my GF what she thinks of the film she said you better take that film off the DVD shelf and throw it in the garbage which i did gladly overall good director ,bad actors,bad dialogue,this film is not horror i repeat not horror,i really don't know why reviewers are saying its horror film,its not,check your brain cells again please you cant label a movie just for the last 20 mins of horrific accident to turn characters to a killer with Michael Myers favorite knifing segment (how did he got a knife again ?)of course i called my friend who recommended the movie for me the next day and i told him he is an idiot and i hang up the phone quickly lol

the_wolf_imdb It is impossible to define this movie as a "horror" or "drama" or "art". It is very hard to actually describe what this movie is about. It is extremely long and mostly consist of a ton of totally irrelevant scenes, dominantly riding in the desert, quarrels and sex under somewhat outdoor conditions. Nothing happens for about one and half hour, then there is a mess of unconnected scenes that try to be violent and dramatic.There are many interpretations in the reviews about what is happening in the movie, but the fact is that the movie has no introduction, no sequential story, no climax and no end. It is not a story, it is a group of gray blots where the patient audience may try to fill some story of their own. But these interpretations are not based on any facts, because there are no facts in the movie.Some say the girl is "unemployed girl from LA" and the guy is "a filmmaker". But I have noticed no facts supporting this explanation. The movie starts with the long sequence where the guy drives the car and the girl sleeps. The violence is supposed to be based on fact the guy hurt the dog. Well, the dog had three legs even before the collision. And I cannot somewhat accept gay ass-rape as the revenge of the injury of dog, it is so definitely out of place. There is no way to interpret the ending and especially murder of the girl. It just does not have any sense. I mean no sense at all! The whole movie is excruciatingly boring and some full body nudity, a bit of violence and occasional simulated sex cannot save the ordinary viewer from the death of boredom. Intellectuals will try to project some of their ideas to this emptiness and may actually enjoy their made up stories and hypotheses of deep meanings of the movie and therefore like it. But they like their own interpretations, not the actual movie as there "is no movie in this movie".The ending of the movie is as pointless as the beginning, only it is very accelerated. It is shortened so much that you have the idea the filmmakers just ran out of the money and had to wrap the thing quickly so they have enough cash to buy the fuel to get back from the desert.I can recommend this piece only for fanatics of "Dogma" and such weird attempts for "high art" movies. Anyone who expects just a enjoyable thriller / horror / drama will hate this movie.

chaos-rampant This is one of those films where "nothing happens", where the frame stands as a window into the world of tedium. It's contrasted against this humming nothingness, mirrored in the film in the empty stretches of desert, that the small gestures can reverberate outwards to the eternal, to give us a portrait of life as we might know it by our own existence, elsewhere, in some other time.These fleeting human moments, painful or exhilarating in their small profundity, largely make the film for me. A man stealing a glance at a passing girl in a diner, glance which may or may not be casual or mean something else, and which makes the woman sulk in jealous consternation. The woman trying to penetrate the hard, unyielding, demeanor of the man, asking him as he drives what is he thinking, the man saying nothing. The irritable tantrum of the man when their car won't go any further in a dirt road, that reveals the male child inside, petulant and impotent at the sight of failure.Elsewhere Dumont fails to cut as incisively. The contrast he gives us in the first pool scene, "do you love me?", "do you like my penis?", is simpleminded at best.The film works despite all that, first as a tangible reminder of the meaninglessnes of craving, here in the form of carnal animal sex that needs to be consumated, almost exorcised, the moment it builds. The nothingness of Dumont's desert world is not the shunyata of the Buddhists though, a realization of the world in true form. Rather it's a limbo where souls in disconnect aimlessly drag their feet yearning for a sense of direction or purpose when the only sense possible is a sense of still time. This shines for me in the latenight scene where David finds Katia sitting by herself at the side of the macadam, they seem like they're washed ashore in some other plain of existence. A pall of simmering, unspeakable, violence hangs over this like the shifting rents of dust in a dirt road, so that at least a breaking point can be surmised to be waiting at the other end.Then it works for me as a painful vehicle that brings us at the brink of the existential void. I'm not very enamored of the act of random cruelty that makes this possible, the randomness makes sense yet at the same time it's so easy as to be schematic, but the monster that emerges on the other end is a shocking sight to me because I have the memory of the flawed human being that used to be.The dysfunction of the protagonists then, foremostly human, also foreshadows doom. That malaise we see but small traces of in their behavior must exist out there too, in the rest of the world that is largely kept from our eyes.Dumont doesn't dare go any further than this, that is if we accept there is somewhere to go, but as an agnostic lament it goes far enough.

statistician_t Yes, reading the reviews is much more rewarding. By any measure.This review contains spoilers. Read further anyway. It doesn't matter, even when you're intending to see the movie.The film begins with two people in a SUV, David and Katia, driving to the Joshua Tree Desert. Despite all their misunderstandings, they feel attracted to each other, but regularly explode in quarrels and fights. That part of the film was logical and understandable. The film is a study in how relationships can go haywire. One can have look at what they talk. Or you could listen to the silence when they should talk. In your mind, you could even speak up for them when they fail.But why did they cut away the entire character development? Really, I could not care less about David and Katia. What they said and how they behaved was in the end meaningless. In contrast, I rather enjoyed their nude bodies, their physical exercise and the wonderful landscape of the Joshua Tree Desert. Wow.The film ends with three hillbillies tailgating them on a desert road, stopping them, pulling them from the car, and raping David. Why and WHY did this happen? Out from the nothing, the film ends with a sudden conclusion, and you'll never get to know why they were targeted.It has been said that Bruno Dumont, the director of this film, translated a life-negating state of mind into a film. David and Katia were already outcasts in the beginning - he speaks only English and French, Katia only Russian and French - and they were rejected by the desert, a place where you have to rely on your fellow human beings in order to survive."Twentynine Palms" is an ill-fated parable. I don't say Bruno Dumont is a bad filmmaker. But as a filmmaker, he forgot to counterbalance the philosophical, psychological and the tardiness parts with a credible and suspenseful story.