Enter the Void

Director Gaspar Noé's filmmaking artistry is put to dazzling use in the hallucinatory tale of an American drug dealer's fatal descent.

While mainstream, mind-bending blockbusters such as "Inception" light Hollywood's fire, French art-house bad boy Gaspar Noé throws down his own gauntlet with the spectacular head trip "Enter the Void." The Argentina-born Noé last divided filmgoers with the assaultive and gimmicky "Irréversible," notorious for a one-shot rape scene that lasted eight minutes. Where that movie's pummeling sensibility felt cheap, though, this one works you over in order to stretch you out. Probing the fuzzy, synaptic turbulence of drug culture and life-after-death — "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" is referenced early on, while Stanley Kubrick and Kenneth Anger get visual shout-outs — "Enter the Void" displays a dizzying virtuosity with the cinema of altered states. [...]

di Robert Abele, articolo completo (3204 caratteri spazi inclusi) su The Los Angeles Times 24 settembre 2010