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100Be forewarned: Dog Days, like many of Seidel's films, will drive some moviegoers to rage and walkouts with its unrelentingly depressing tone. But it also a remarkable, deeply disturbing work by a brilliant filmmaker.
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90An acid portrait of contemporary Austria (and by extension, the whole middle class) as unspeakably dull, violent and stupid. The film itself, miraculously, is just the opposite: vibrantly inventive, aesthetically rigorous, sardonic and occasionally quite brilliant.
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80The believability comes from the casting: he has found a group of actors and nonprofessionals who interact spectacularly well.
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75Dog Days has much in common with "Code Unknown" -- both dart among several characters who may occasionally cross paths.
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75His (Seidl) camera is shocking in its intimacy, his film surprisingly casual in its depiction of extreme behavior and the randomness of violence.
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Willfully provocative, much like a small child performing outrageous acts just to get some attention.
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70Looks very much like a documentary: It's grainy and raw, and Seidl's actors -- a mix of actors and non-professionals -- are often unglamorously posed under what appears to be natural light.
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70Dog Days is in fact a bleak but deeply felt humanism -- a yearning that we might all learn to better love our neighbors and, perhaps more importantly, ourselves.
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70Strangely entertaining.
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50It is admirable and well-made, but unutterably depressing and unredeemed by any glimmer of hope.
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50Some scenes of Ulrich Seidl's first fiction feature (he's already a respected documentary maker) are so brutal and degrading that they're hard to watch. Others are highly atmospheric and sometimes quite funny.
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50Working with non-professional actors, Seidl emphasizes their ordinariness to the point of cartoonish ridicule, putting them in scenarios either banal, perverse, or both at the same time.
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50Dog Days adheres dogmatically to the school of sado-miserablism that Seidl's compatriots Michael Haneke and Jessica Hausner have turned into something of a national industry (non-Austrian adherents abound too, from Gaspar Noé to Harmony Korine).
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Occasionally provocative but frequently wearying.