#1960 SODOM AND GOMORRAH MOVIE REVIEWS TV#
READ MORE: IndieWire Stands With Women: 27 TV Shows Created By Women, Starring Women, That We Absolutely Love But that simple idyll is soured in a bad way when a badly scarred Reverend (Pearce) strolls into town, stepping up to the pulpit of the local church like he owns the place and raining verbal hellfire upon the petrified congregation. Without it, the film would neither be lucid enough to work as a moral epic, nor exciting enough to work as a Western.Īmong the most expensive Dutch movies ever made (a luxury that Koolhoven earned for himself with a string of local hits like “Winter in Wartime” and “Happy Family”), “Brimstone” begins in a small village where a mute young woman called Liz ( Dakota Fanning, never better) works as a midwife with the support of her much older husband. That uncertainty, and the nagging desire to solve it, is at the troubled soul of what makes “Brimstone” such a strangely compelling experience. Sometimes Koolhoven seems as though he shares the impish sense of humor that has always characterized the work of Lars von Trier, and sometimes it seems as though he’s never laughed in his life. While ostensibly a proto-feminist empowerment tale about the horrors that women have suffered in the supposed pursuit of piety, “Brimstone” doesn’t hide how much fun it’s having during the sequence that’s set inside a pioneer town brothel, nor does it do anything to dissuade viewers from the idea that its villain - a black-eyed preacher played by Guy Pearce - has literally clawed his way out of hell.
#1960 SODOM AND GOMORRAH MOVIE REVIEWS MOVIE#
Told with a steady tone that marries the anivine retribution of the Old Testament with the heightened slickness of a graphic novel, this gruesome carnival of debasement may be set in the lawless frontiers of 19th century America, but it might be more accurately located somewhere between Sodom and Gomorrah and “Sin City.” It’s the kind of movie in which an actor from “Game of Thrones” murders someone who’s taking a shit in an outhouse - the kind of movie in which a dying man, choking on a noose made out of his own intestines, still finds the spirit to tell his wife that he loves her.Įven after four discrete chapters (each of which is saddled with a subtitle like “Revelation” or “Exodus”) and 148 minutes of incest and murder, it’s hard to tell just how seriously Koolhoven takes himself.
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Reverent and ridiculous in equal measure, Martin Koolhoven’s “ Brimstone” is a wild pseudo-Western that trembles beneath the biblical weight of its comically grim story.