Ben X.

Ben X: "The best movie I've seen about teen angst since Donnie Darko comes from Belgium?" wonders Brian Miller in the Voice. "It's also the best film about a bullied teen with Asperger's Syndrome that I've seen from any country, and its blurred life-into-vidgame fantasy sequences makes it seem doubly topical."

Director Nic Balthazar's "aesthetic is ugly, aloof, maddeningly literal and unimaginative," finds Slant's Ed Gonzalez, "but at least the visual excess of the film is on par with the histrionic bullying Ben is subjected to and the hilarious revenge he gets at the end - a corny guilt trip unsurprisingly scored to Sigur Rós."

"Trapped behind a ceaseless, urgent monologue and wildly darting eyes, Ben is a symphony of agonized alienation," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "Yet however representative of the chaos in his head, the film's relentlessly paranoid aesthetics come off more as a formal exercise in social dissonance than an empathetic study of human suffering."

Online viewing tip. FilmCatcher talks with Balthazar.

Posted by dwhudson at October 27, 2008 1:43 AM