4.

"Like trying to comprehend that you just got punched in the gut, watching Ilya Khrzhanovsky's 4 requires that you live with it for a while in order to let the feeling sink in," writes Laureen Kaminsky, leading off this week's Reverse Shot round at indieWIRE. "This film does not imitate life, it creates it - it lives and breathes a little different from anything you've seen before, and yet the result is somehow painfully recognizable."

This time around, there are, appropriately enough, four writers, with Michael Koresky rounding out the four corners: "I wish I could provide some sort of strong counterpoint for the sake of this roundelay, yet to play devil's advocate against something as singular and profoundly effective as 4 would be a crime against the art form I love so much."

Updated through 4/8.

J Hoberman in the Voice: "Although Khrzhanovsky has several tricks up his sleeve, 4's most provocative quality is its ironic surplus of beauty."

At the AV Club, Noel Murray finds 4 "mired in the methodology of contemporary foreign films" and rates it a C.

Reminders: Daniel Kasman, nearly a year ago now (scroll down), and, for Stylus, Sandro Matosevic: "But - let's not fool ourselves - 4 is no Russian Ark and Khrjanovsky is no Tarkovsky, and the case it pushes for the cinema of its own country is never as assuringly resounding as it aims to be."

Back in February, Twitch's logboy found a trailer.

Update, 4/6: Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Press: "It's easily the most visceral work of art on screens right now."

Update, 4/7: Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "As opaque as it is mesmerizing, 4 demands open eyes and open minds, but neither is it as difficult as all its weighty silences, oblique detours and countless images of glistening, sweating animal flesh — Mother Russia's raw and seriously overcooked — might suggest."

Updates, 4/8: Cinematical's Ryan Stewart: "Eventually, the film itself seems to fall victim to the kind of degeneration that it is capturing."

Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: "Khrjanovsky, in his first film, seeks nothing less than to create a vision of Russia's subconscious, and the results are both unforgettable and so unflattering that the film reportedly created a minor furor in his home country. He's an extraordinarily gifted filmmaker, and 4, before it becomes infatuated with its own Boschian imagery and falls into excessive cronage (cronyism?) and artiness, is haunting, gorgeous and relentlessly bleak."

Posted by dwhudson at April 5, 2006 5:08 AM