Cannes. Johnny Mad Dog.

"The brutal French-Belgian-Liberian movie Johnny Mad Dog, an assaultive fiction about Liberian child soldiers made with boys and girls who actually fought in that country's recent war, left me wrung out - furious, confused, deep in thought," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

"One of a gang of lost children who call themselves 'the death dealers,' Mad Dog roams the wastelands of his country, spreading machine-gun terror and death - to men, women and other children - in the name of the revolution. Whose revolution? The movie doesn't say.... Without context, information or explanation, the movie plunges you into horror - yet, to what end?"

"Cinema is forever inventing new ways to tell us that war is hell, but few recent films have explored the extremes of that hell as vividly or intrepidly as Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's African drama Johnny Mad Dog," writes Jonathan Romney in Screen Daily. "Shattering performances by unknowns, many of them actually former child soldiers, plus a confrontational directing style make this one of the most striking recent French fiction debuts.... There's a certain Lord of the Flies horror in the suggestion that these are still children at play in the most murderous way, their battle garb suggestive of a nightmarish carnival."

"Kidnapping takes its vilest form as armed children in Liberia commandeer other kids to join their marauding troop," writes Duane Byrge in the Hollywood Reporter. "Fiction based on unbelievable fact, Johnny Mad Dog chronicles the atrocities of the ongoing civil war in that West African nation. Although hard to watch, it's an important document that should scorch sensibilities on the festival circuit."

Un Certain Regard.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 22, 2008 12:50 AM