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BIG BAD WOLVES

Navot Papushado, Aharon Keshales Israel, 2013
[Big Bad Wolves] invites us to read the movie as a political allegory... As Big Bad Wolves brilliantly shows, even seemingly normal citizens (not to mention loving fathers) might hide a body in their cellar. Highlighting the specific national context in which this work was made can serve to read its moral lesson anew.
February 5, 2014
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A film like last year's "Prisoners" shows that a similar premise can be played for powerful, thought-provoking drama. The makers of "Big Bad Wolves" may want to claim a serious social critique for their film, but they have elected to bury it so deeply within thriller genre conventions that most viewers won't bother to dig for it.
January 17, 2014
The New York Times
As a boy counts down, two girls, one dressed in red and the other in blue, enter a derelict building. One stays, the other leaves; one dies; the other, well, who knows, much less cares, what happens to her? Certainly not the writers and directors, Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, for whom murdered children are just an easy, conveniently blunt and effectively faceless (and headless) means to a self-satisfied, jokey and blood-slicked end.
January 16, 2014
The most novel thing about this Israeli torture extravaganza is that writer-directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado play the grisly material for broad comedy, going so far as to include a Neil Simon-worthy subplot about the vigilante's overbearing Jewish parents.
January 15, 2014
Keshales and Papushado attempt to inject some pointed political commentary about the Israel-Palestine conflict by situating the remote main locale next to an Arab village. But mostly, Big Bad Wolves wallows in blood-spattering bursts of gore and black-comic silliness, as in a scene in which the baking of a doped-up cake is scored to Buddy Holly's "Everyday." The movie is never less than involving, but rarely amounts to more than a third-generation grindhouse knockoff.
January 14, 2014
In addition to its accomplished visual style and pacing, and its excellent cast, special mention should be made of the writing, particularly the way in which it manages to inject all sorts of comedy into the gaps between the mayhem—and sometimes directly into the nail-pulling brutality itself.
January 7, 2014
What could have easily turned into a heavy philosophical dirge in the vein of Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners, Keshales and Papushado opt for knock-about fun, comic-tempered performances and eccentric digressions which add some nice colour to proceedings. Indeed, the film's highlight is the late-game introduction of a local Arab on a horse who just seems to swan into the film, speak all the best lines, and then swan out again.
December 5, 2013
By willfully denying viewers the very evidence against Dror that has unequivocally convinced Miki and Gidi, as well as Dror's students, of his guilt, Big Bad Wolves severely undercuts any potential critique of Gidi's murderous revenge—just as the film's depiction of finger-smashing, toenail-ripping, chest-blowtorching cruelty for intense genre thrills ultimately weakens its halfhearted attempts to sincerely wrestle with the ethicality of eye-for-an-eye justice.
April 23, 2013