Brand Upon the Brain! 2007

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: The film is a singular achievement. Read more

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: The director's form of genial cinematic dementia is guaranteed not to be to all tastes at all times, but those who are looking for something strange and different will feel right at home. Read more

Manohla Dargis, New York Times: Written by Mr. Maddin and George Toles, his longtime screenwriting partner, the story builds on familiar types and narrative conventions that, over time, are all but obscured by layer upon layer of idiosyncratic detail. Read more

Lou Lumenick, New York Post: Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin pushes his love of lurid melodrama to the limit in his latest demented treat, Brand Upon the Brain! Read more

Andrew Sarris, New York Observer: Succeeds at one and the same time in functioning as both a celebration and a deconstruction of the conscious and unconscious glories of silent movies through the barely 30 years of their existence at the beginning of the 20th century. Read more

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: Narrated by Isabella Rossellini and enhanced by Jason Staczek's superb score, this is characteristically intense and, unlike most of Maddin's silent-movie models, frenetically edited. Read more

Scott Tobias, AV Club: A typically spastic, experimental mix of old-fashioned movie effects and overheated Freudian melodrama. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: No matter how much the director disguises the tale in flickery symbolism, the emotions feel painful and personal. Read more

John Monaghan, Detroit Free Press: For me it captures Maddin at his loopiest and most inspired. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: Beautiful, disturbing and indisputably unique. Read more

Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer: ... a feverishly imaginative Freudian vampire film ... Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: An astonishing film: weird, obsessed, drawing on subterranean impulses, hypnotic. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: A surprisingly frightening and affecting film, launching itself from vertiginous peaks into shadowy hollows. Read more

Ruthe Stein, San Francisco Chronicle: Brand Upon the Brain! is like no other movie you're likely to see this year -- or any other year. It won't be to everyone's taste. But for those who like their cinema weird, it doesn't get any weirder or more oddly fascinating than this. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: The deliciously unhinged Guy Maddin makes films that are funny, sinister and mysterious at the same time. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star: You don't want to miss one frenzied minute of it. Read more

Scott Foundas, Variety: A typically frenetic, Maddin-esque amalgam of the autobiographical, Freudian and willfully absurd. Read more

Aaron Hillis, Village Voice: A drolly phantasmagoric, silent-film spectacle in which Freud meets Feuillade and Frankenstein! Not to discredit its wild artistry by saying the gimmick's the prize, but... the gimmick's the prize. Read more