purrlgurrl If only we could give a negative number of stars! Only a French director could make a film this pretentious and excruciatingly dull. You could turn down the sound, avoid looking at the opening credits, and still know it's a French film because the couple who are its "stars" are gaunt, pale, rumpled, Boho, and her sleeves are too long. Oh, and they perpetually look sullen. We watch them do nothing more than drive around in the desert and sit around at a motel. These long stretches of nothing happening and almost no dialogue are punctuated by scenes of mechanical, graphic sex performed at a high decibel level. The film then ends in an orgy of violence that comes out of nowhere.The only point this movie has is the one on the filmmaker's head.

Greenzombidog May contain spoilers.A couple drive about arguing, eating, getting naked in the desert and occasionally having some animalistic sex. There is no real plot. There is no depth to the characters. The woman is a completely vapid idiot. The guy is a shaggy haired Burk. The only positive for the almost two hours running time are some nice scenic shots. The movie contains every cliché of art house cinema. Long periods of silence, close ups of characters faces as they begin to cry, characters talking in different languages to each other, a three legged animal, it's like a student film maker saying "look, at me I'm being arty".Then in the final fifteen minutes the film turns "Dark". A totally unprovoked and vicious sexual attack takes place. The aftermath of which is probably more shocking than the event. These few scenes are made more shocking by how mundane the rest of the movie is. Which I feel is a cheat. I wasn't shocked because I cared about the characters it was just the visual of this scene. Remove this from the movie and there's literally nothing you would remember about it.Described as an experimental horror film, I don't know what the experiment was. Maybe it's whether you can get away with an hour and half of nothing as long as you stick something nasty on the end. I think the experiment was a waste of time.

Lisa A. Flowers While working in the California desert, French auteur Bruno Dumont (Flanders, Humanite, The Life Of Jesus) "suddenly became afraid." Thus blossomed Twentynine Palms, a mesmerizing, allegorical, terrifyingly unclassifiable foray into the Mojave and the problematic center of Yeats' The Second Coming. Ostensibly, Palms is the story of an American photographer, David (David Wissak) and his European girlfriend, Katia (Yekaterina Golubeva of Leos Carax's Pola X) on assignment in the Joshua Tree desert. Hobbled by a Babelish communication barrier, their interaction limited to sex, and a mutual, rapidly disintegrating co-dependence, the couple is moving deeper into no-man's land on some kind of aimless and encroachingly sinister vision quest. An exquisite road picture interspersed with long pockets of drifting, expansive dreaminess, Palms has moments of serenity and meditative calm. But make no mistake: it's moving closer to something awful in every frame, its sense of what's approaching disarmed rather than exacerbated by the landscape…the opposite strategy of pictures like Peter Weir's Picnic At Hanging Rock, another brilliant nature film in which the natural world becomes oppressive and claustrophobic despite the freedom of sky and open spaces. The film benefits enormously from the perfect physical appearance of its leads: Wissak has alarming eyes and a face that seems to have disaster imprinted into it...one of the most brilliant achievements of the film is the way the faces of both leads keep fluctuating from dead to alive, without any noticeable outward changes in makeup or lighting.The concept of Palms as a love story, as some have called it, falls hard. The film is loaded with sex…intense, wailing, despairing sex that foreshadows in every way the horror that is to come at movie's end, though exactly what kind of a statement Dumont was trying to make with this remains unclear; one is inevitably moved to question his motives in the same way many questioned Gaspar Noe's in Irreversible (a film to which Palms has been infrequently compared). But Dumont's superb sense of artistry and restraint has noting is common with Noe's adolescent appropriation of philosophies too sophisticated for him and his fascination with cruelty and sadism cloaked in frantic & flashy concept art. Instead, Twentynine Palms presents us with the problem of evil accompanied by a sense of profound and deep sorrow, a mourning for a fate that may or may not be implied as inexorable, playing out under the unchanging beauty of land and sky.

jkantor It's not even enough to blame this on warped French sensibilities. There is no movie here - no plot, no story, no theme, no characters, no cinematography, no soundtrack - just boring shots of the desert inter cut with boring shots of awkward sex - until you finally and mercifully get an ending that is apparently from a different movie entirely. I think it must be a perverse joke by the director - some kind of statement on the absolute banality of our lives if we are willing to sit through something like this - and the fact that the best we can hope for is a violent end to our empty existence. The director should never be allowed to touch a camera again in his life.