Review of Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) by Damien F — 09 Jun 2007

Ever since having seen The Saddest Music in the World, Guy Maddin has been one of my favorite contemporary film directors. He's, all at once, an iconoclastic avant-gardist and retro-minded film historian who crafts weird, surreal, endlessly imaginative and strangely resonant jewels of films.

This one is among his best of the ones I've seen, with scheming lovers, two severed blue hands, beauty/abortion parlor, and a wax museum filled with Canadian hockey player statues. And there's a good deal of full frontal nudity - which is delightfully jarring in the context of this modern silent film (in certain scenes, it really could pass for something made in 1928).