Bacurau
Director: Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho
Year Released: 2019
Rating: 2.0
In the (fictitious) village of Bacurau (in Brazil), things start getting ... peculiar after the passing of one of the matriarchs: the place disappears off of maps, flying saucers start appearing overhead, the residents keep fighting with the Mayor (who provides them with coffins and anti-depressants) and a group of English-speaking mercenaries come in and want to wipe the place out. It's laid out rather leisurely, but it could have used more cohesion: scenes sometimes feel arbitrarily stuck together, so it's like someone with ADHD trying to tell you a simple story and it forgets to develop any of its inhabitants (beyond "good" and "bad"). I was hoping it would go someplace other than the rote racist/imperialist angle - embodied by Udo Kier ("They're not white") - and I know Filho and Dornelles saw Jodorowsky's El Topo and thought, "We should do something like that" ... except they don't dare go nearly as far as Jodo did.