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88It's an astonishing film: weird, obsessed, drawing on subterranean impulses, hypnotic.
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88The film is a singular achievement.
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88Not many people are making silent horror serials these days, but Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin pushes his love of lurid melodrama to the limit in his latest demented treat, Brand Upon the Brain!
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88A feverishly imaginative Freudian vampire film from Guy Maddin, is like a silent-movie serial by Louis Feuillade or an improbable collaboration between writer Oscar Wilde and photographer Man Ray.
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88Audacious, hypnotic and utterly breathtaking.
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83This much is guaranteed: You won't leave thinking you've seen the like before.
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80The result is giddy, exciting and hilarious, not quite like any artistic experience you've ever had.
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80Delirious, ingenious, often very funny and strangely touching film.
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80Enhanced by Jason Staczek's superb score, this is characteristically intense and, unlike most of Maddin's silent-movie models, frenetically edited.
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75Wildly imaginative if extremely strange.
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75How often are psychosexual lunacy and classic cinema combined so fiendishly well?
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75Coming after the inspired trifecta of "Dracula: Pages From A Virgin's Diary," "Cowards Bend The Knee," and "The Saddest Music In The World," Brand feels a little like boilerplate Maddin rather than a fresh burst of inspiration.
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Winnepeg filmmaker Guy Maddin isn't known for run-of-the-mill movies, but the feature he debuted at the Toronto Fest was outrageous even for him. A silent film taking the form of a twelve-chapter Feuillade-flavored serial and designed to have live accompaniment, the movie itself is a match for any of his features to date, and could outstrip earlier efforts in the arthouse arena.
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70Billed as a silent film, Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain! is actually closer to a live theatrical event -- a feature-length motion picture screened with the accompaniment of a live orchestra, plus Foley artists, sound effects technicians and assorted vocalists, too. Together, they provide the elaborate soundscape for a typically frenetic, Maddin-esque amalgam of the autobiographical, Freudian and willfully absurd.
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Not to discredit its wild artistry by saying the gimmick's the prize, but . . . the gimmick's the prize. Without all the hoopla, there simply isn't enough variation to this stylized fever-dream to justify its fatiguing running time, nor to call it anything less than predictably Maddin–esque.