Brand Upon the Brain!

What is the matter of a movie like that. It's not a movie, it's not a speakie. The actors swirl around like puppets. The images are so hurtful you don't stop blinking during the screening. Above all, what is the plot... Full review

Brand Upon the Brain! is Guy Maddin's 2nd film in an autobiographical trilogy, which started with "Cowards Bend the Knee" (2003) and ended with "My Winnipeg" (2007). I have been a fan of Maddin for a long time and absolutely loved... Full review

Canadian cult filmmaker Guy Maddin's ecstatically perverse jaunt into childhood's protracted gestation period is a hypnotic murk-fest filled to the brim with Sturm und Drang neo-psychedelia. Guy (Erik Steffen Maahs) returns to his childhood homestead, a lighthouse to restore it... Full review

This is an undeniably powerful film, for all its unorthodoxy; but the only word I could really find to describe it, again and again, was "bizarre". Bizarre to such a degree that, in the demented world shown here, even the... Full review

First of all, I have to say: finally! I was almost positive that I was going to have to wait for DVD for this one, and God knows how long that was going to take. Secondly, I have to speak... Full review

'Brand Upon the Brain' is the perfect example of the kind of intriguing art-film still taking place in remote sects around the world. The kind of film that will go unnoticed by the majority of the film-making and film-going world.... Full review

I truly thought that this movie was horrible and i think it should be taken out of theaters. the acting was horrible and the fact is, i did not understand the plot!... Full review

Make no mistake about it, Canada's Guy Maddin is an enigma. We're talking about somebody who's main inspiration seems to be old Soviet newsreels (the Kino Pravda series,to be exact,by Dziga Vertov,the father of the newsreel). Watching 'Brand Upon The... Full review

Highly stylized, B & W, faux silent film, with voice-over narration by Isabella Rossellini, about a house painter, played by Maddin, beckoned back to his lighthouse home by his dying mother, prompting flashbacks back to when the lighthouse was an... Full review

For the second and probably last time in Toronto, Maddin's newest, silent narrative is given the full treatment - with narrator, adult male soprano, orchestra and foley artists - at the Elgin, and let me tell you, this is a... Full review

Maddin, however, is both hysterically funny and just hysterical. Maddin questions narrative technique, but by jerking us back in time before contemporary cinematic practices had quite congealed, much less standardized. ... Full Review

It's easy to rate the image and sound of this purposefully arcane avant-garde master doodle by Guy Maddin: beautiful. Memories are relived: Guy recalls his prepubescent self (Sullivan Brown) and his rebellious older Sis (Maya Lawson), constantly watched by Mother's (Gretchen Krich) dictatorial light shaft while Father (Tom Moore) holds the standard mad-scientist experiments in the basement. ... Full Review

Guy Maddin's offbeat film follows a housepainter overpowered by his childhood memories.....includes nudity and perverse humor..... ... Full Review

with the right compelling images, anything is possible .....But true to the film's melodramatic form, the plot turns please on a pure entertainment level....Seeing is believing, and the clever Maddin understands a dimension of his medium....The tongue-in-cheek tone of the film's title highlights how Maddin isn't taking it all too seriously.....But her overblown character fits right into Maddin's approach, which is more concerned with his characters' emotions than the realistic portrayal of events..... ... Full Review

Their lesbian romance is all the more erotic for that, although it's traumatic for a prepubescent Guy to walk in on them and note two sets of female breasts. Life on the island keeps getting stranger with Guy's mom convinced she can become a young girl again, and his dad furiously working on dubious experiments. ... Full Review

M y Winnipeg , a book that contains filmmaker Guy ( The Saddest Music in the World , Brand Upon the Brain ) Maddin's annotated script for his eponymous 2007 Documentary Channel-commissioned movie about his home town, will not get... ... Full Article

Even the titles of his films are a little weird: The Saddest Music in the World , Cowards Bend the Knee , Brand upon the Brain! ... Full Article

Showing: 7 and 9 tonight; 5, 7 and 9 p.m. Saturday; and 5 and 7 p.m. Sunday at UWM Union Theatre, at 2200 E. Kenwood Blvd. ... Full Article

American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Bl, Hollywood, (323) 466-3456.Egyptiantheatre.com.Brand Upon the Brain! 7:30, 9:30.In the Spielberg Theatre: EuroCinema - Summer '04 , 7:30; with short Temerario . ... Full Article

Guy Maddin's latest cinematic joke is on the audience . BRAND UPON THE BRAIN - the latest effort from cult auteur Guy Maddin - rolls into Hollywood's Egyptian Theatre with quite a cache: The New York times' Manohla Dargis has... ... Full Article

In many cases, it is the often-warped remembrances of childhood that provide the greatest examples of joy, intrigue and fear. Looking back on one's adolescence is like opening a pop up book, where the distorted, fantastical characters and events transport... ... Full Article