This mordant but oddly nostalgic film receives a strong release that testifies to the Safdie brothers’ then-nascent talent.
For better and worse, Jesse Eisenberg’s satire hits its targets dead on.
The film is more taken by its own formal composition than enunciating the musical edification promised by its title.
What could have been a rote retread of Pasolini’s Teorema blossoms into a study of factional identity and power dynamics.
The Safdies’ film is one of the most harrowing cinematic depictions of drug addiction in recent memory.
Its myriad impressions never quite add up to anything coherent, but perhaps the incoherence is precisely the point.
Not so much an actual movie as an assortment of Amerindie affectations, The Dish & the Spoon doesn’t waste a moment on recognizable reality.
Rather than express any emotional truth of its own, Bad Fever merely adopts an attitude that resembles one.
Little details begin to accumulate, and you begin to suspect that the Safdies might (partially) know what they’re up to.
If this is the future of American indie cinema, than perhaps consideration should be given to blowing the whole thing up.
The contest between one’s desire to flee home and the attraction to the formative people and places of one’s youth forms the crux of the film.