BallWubba Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

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

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Greenzombidog May contain spoilers.A couple drive about arguing, eating, getting naked in the desert and occasionally having some animalistic sex. There is no real plot. There is no depth to the characters. The woman is a completely vapid idiot. The guy is a shaggy haired Burk. The only positive for the almost two hours running time are some nice scenic shots. The movie contains every cliché of art house cinema. Long periods of silence, close ups of characters faces as they begin to cry, characters talking in different languages to each other, a three legged animal, it's like a student film maker saying "look, at me I'm being arty".Then in the final fifteen minutes the film turns "Dark". A totally unprovoked and vicious sexual attack takes place. The aftermath of which is probably more shocking than the event. These few scenes are made more shocking by how mundane the rest of the movie is. Which I feel is a cheat. I wasn't shocked because I cared about the characters it was just the visual of this scene. Remove this from the movie and there's literally nothing you would remember about it.Described as an experimental horror film, I don't know what the experiment was. Maybe it's whether you can get away with an hour and half of nothing as long as you stick something nasty on the end. I think the experiment was a waste of time.

Lisa A. Flowers While working in the California desert, French auteur Bruno Dumont (Flanders, Humanite, The Life Of Jesus) "suddenly became afraid." Thus blossomed Twentynine Palms, a mesmerizing, allegorical, terrifyingly unclassifiable foray into the Mojave and the problematic center of Yeats' The Second Coming. Ostensibly, Palms is the story of an American photographer, David (David Wissak) and his European girlfriend, Katia (Yekaterina Golubeva of Leos Carax's Pola X) on assignment in the Joshua Tree desert. Hobbled by a Babelish communication barrier, their interaction limited to sex, and a mutual, rapidly disintegrating co-dependence, the couple is moving deeper into no-man's land on some kind of aimless and encroachingly sinister vision quest. An exquisite road picture interspersed with long pockets of drifting, expansive dreaminess, Palms has moments of serenity and meditative calm. But make no mistake: it's moving closer to something awful in every frame, its sense of what's approaching disarmed rather than exacerbated by the landscape…the opposite strategy of pictures like Peter Weir's Picnic At Hanging Rock, another brilliant nature film in which the natural world becomes oppressive and claustrophobic despite the freedom of sky and open spaces. The film benefits enormously from the perfect physical appearance of its leads: Wissak has alarming eyes and a face that seems to have disaster imprinted into it...one of the most brilliant achievements of the film is the way the faces of both leads keep fluctuating from dead to alive, without any noticeable outward changes in makeup or lighting.The concept of Palms as a love story, as some have called it, falls hard. The film is loaded with sex…intense, wailing, despairing sex that foreshadows in every way the horror that is to come at movie's end, though exactly what kind of a statement Dumont was trying to make with this remains unclear; one is inevitably moved to question his motives in the same way many questioned Gaspar Noe's in Irreversible (a film to which Palms has been infrequently compared). But Dumont's superb sense of artistry and restraint has noting is common with Noe's adolescent appropriation of philosophies too sophisticated for him and his fascination with cruelty and sadism cloaked in frantic & flashy concept art. Instead, Twentynine Palms presents us with the problem of evil accompanied by a sense of profound and deep sorrow, a mourning for a fate that may or may not be implied as inexorable, playing out under the unchanging beauty of land and sky.

owenessa sorry people: no amount of pseudo-intellectual drivel can justify the dog's breakfast. a horror movie with no actual horror? that's not experimental, that's crap. whoever said movies about images and not story is totally, completely, wrong. Paintings are about images. Movies are about story, plot, characterisation...these things a movie make. if images are your thing, go to a gallery. don't try and excuse self-indulgent cinematic vomit. this film takes an hour and a half for nothing to happen; when it does, it's out of the blue, out of context and out of proportion. the preceding ninety minutes do nothing to build suspense, they are merely boring. nothing about the characters is explained, no back-story is given, and when the inevitable violence occurs, it's relief to know that these two examples of human excrement will not disgrace our screens further. i want my two hours back. rapid painful death to those who drive hummers.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx This is a film about a young couple, possibly at an early stage in their relationship, who are out in the desert somewhere in California in a humvee. The young man David is scouting for locations to photograph but doesn't seem to get up to much work, Katia his girlfriend is a francophone. They communicate fairly well through a mixture of pidgin French and English from David, but it adds a little distance maybe. It's a harsh kind of a film that makes you feel uneasy from the start. The relationship is very volatile and the desert locations unrelenting. It ends in horror. One warning to anyone who sees the movie is that it is very sexually explicit.I hadn't realised that Dumont had an interest in image, this film is full of the most awesome experimental image work. There was this scene at the start where the Hummer is taking on petrol at the gas station and there's the tiniest frame made from where the road embankment in the background starts at the bottom to the top of the open car door frame at the top, a sliver where cars dash past, but they're also dashing into their own reflection in the side windows of the car, and all this is brutally at about head level. I wondered if this might have been accidental brilliance, so casually did the movie appear to have been made. However very shortly afterwards I was really sitting up because there's another masterpiece of composition where a train with white containers passes in front of this windfarm and you only get to see the windmills in the gaps between the slowly moving containers. It's one of the most beautiful shots I've ever seen in a movie. Again in the pool at the hotel, you can see a guy who wants to work the camera, the shot is really only a couple of inches above the lapping water and you see this image of David, strongly distorted by the water that's pretty cool.There are some very primal love scenes shot in what I refer to as the sea of stone, the pair of lovers apricating naked on a gigantic rock resting their heads on the other's boot, reminiscent of Zabriskie Point to me. The ending of the movie is so brutal, and even to me unexpected, because I hadn't read anything about the film. I feel almost like crying about it now.It's a film about the distance even between the minds of two lovers, and the incipient brutality of an alienated society. A total masterpiece.