SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

framptonhollis By turns a dark comedy, horror film, Gothic love story, and heartbreaking drama, "Cowards Bend the Knee" is a magnificent carnival of the bizarre. It carries the typical Guy Maddin style, which imitates silent, experimental cinema-normally mixing it with dark humor and surprising poetry. In this film, Maddin uses his style to the best of its ability by a forming a unique, genre bending masterwork of the avant garde. Mixing slapstick, sex, and scares Maddin creates an otherworldly and wholly surreal experience around a wacky plot that involves revenge, decapitated hands, hockey, abortion, and a fake breast. Sounds weird, right? Well, it is. It really, really is. ...and for fans of weird, surreal cinema it's a real treasure. I found myself laughing and shaking during this wild feast for the eyes. It has its moments of disorientation and confusion, but within those moments lies a deep and subtle beauty. Guy Maddin is similar to Jim Jarmusch because his films are like cinematic poems, but while Jarmusch seems to be making beat poetry, Maddin makes completely off the wall, experimental poetry!

Polaris_DiB Understand that I'm getting a bit tired of people comparing every strange movie that comes along to a David Lynch film too. Unfortunately, Lynch is the norm and just about one of the most accessible strange filmmakers out there, so sometimes the comparison is needed for a starting point, like in this case.This movie is, roughly speaking, the story of a swinging hockey player who gets entrapped in a bunch of relationships, including most prominently one with a scarred daughter who wants her father's death revenged. Her father's killer? Her mother. It includes but is not limited to perverse sexuality, weird psychoses, and severed arms.It's shot in black and white and is a silent film, which creates for it a sort of removed surreality/abstractness which is, honestly, reminiscent of Eraserhead and Lynch's Lumiere and Company short.What makes it Maddin's, though, is the use of imagery from his childhood (the barbershop, the hockey players, etc.) set to a blatant sexuality which goes beyond just being blatant but enforces it: you see the sexual image, and then the words follow saying exactly what you were thinking. No more subtlety and deranged fetishes, this is straight-forward Freud and primal scene.Because of this, this film as a whole remains true to itself and never lets go of its own private Universe, one that we could never live in and yet, terribly, can relate to, figure out, and eventually even understand.Beyond that, there's not much that can be talked about this movie besides the fact that it there's no common approach to it. It has no genre (besides maybe Silent film) and is disconcerting, requiring a certain level of viewer interaction that most movies don't ask for. For fans of strange and insane cinema, it's great; for anybody looking to be entertained, this is most definitely not for you.--PolarisDiB

John Seal Okay, I've tried and I've tried, but I STILL DON'T GET this Guy Maddin thing. Tales From the Gimli Hospital left me cold, that movie about the Austrian villagers and the one about the Ice Nymph were pretty to look but lacking in the story department...and this nudie movie about abortion and hockey is just boring. I'm glad Maddin has an appreciation for silent film, but I dislike his films for the same reason I dislike the films of Quentin Tarantino: they're empty homages to better, more imaginative films--films that advanced the art form or broke new ground--and are all style and no substance. No amount of jump cuts and odd camera angles can disguise the fact that Maddin is an unoriginal David Lynch wannabe, though he DOES have one advantage over Tarantino: he generally doesn't write embarrassing dialogue, because most of his films rely on intertitles. The bottom line is, Maddin's schtick is clever clever film-making for aspiring film majors.

paulduane Well, this is quite probably one of the most uncategorisable films I've seen - you couldn't possibly call it a comedy, with its beauty salons that moonlight as abortion clinics/brothels, and its disturbingly self-lacerating portrait of the director as a cowardly lecher and cold-blooded murderer. But parts of it are hilarious. Go figure. In brief, the plot concerns Guy Maddin, hockey player for the Winnipeg Maroons, who takes his pregnant girlfriend to the above-mentioned clinic for a termination and then leaves her (literally in the middle of the procedure) for the brothel-keeper's beautiful daughter, played with incandescent and slightly scary intensity by Melissa Dionisio (that surely cant be her real name, can it?) only to discover that she can't allow herself to be touched by a man's hands (an uncharacteristically direct quote from Lon Chaney's 'The Unknown') until her father's murder has been avenged. And then she produced the jar in which she keeps, preserved, her father's hands... After that we get a twist on that old chestnut 'The Hands of Orlac', combined with a surprisingly explicit dose of sexual excess and weird psychology, as young Guy ends up in deep trouble of every sort imaginable, through his own inability to control his lusts. Told in ten chapters of six minutes apiece, this was intended as a gallery installation but it works just fine as a movie. As long as you don't mind a regular dose of jawdropping strangeness and a large splash of shocking, unfathomable directorial masochism.