Joseph Jon Lanthier

By examining the relationship between Samson and Delilah through the wrong end of the telescope, Thorton soaks in the arid, unaccommodating surroundings with occasionally oxymoronic lucidity.

Despite all this macabre torment, It's Such a Beautiful Day involves a lot of sweet, plucky humor that represents a discreet softening of the angry sarcasm for which Hertzfeldt has become known.

Its looseness adequately portrays Plimpton as an inwardly conflicted figure, but it fails to make much of a case for his legacy outside of The Paris Review's still-noticeable brand.

The film is a conversation between two disadvantaged artists with indelible personalities, both of whom are unabashedly manipulating their way into at least the esoteric side of the everlasting.

The plot willfully denies our satisfaction, often at the risk of compromising its own structural integrity.

Writer-director Dan Sallitt's fourth feature moves with confident boldness from the incestuous gauntlet its prologue impishly hurls down.

The film's beguiling visual poetry and smatterings of sociological subtext function less than coherently as transitional markers between cinematic epochs, or even as the nascent burblings of any imminent DIY revolution; instead, they're redolent of a modernist apotheosis.

Its meta-cinematic "think piece"-ness is redeemed by the slinky symmetries drawn between Massadian's own auteur-ship and the protagonist's narrative role.

The lack of a strong expository voice further simplifies the wealth of explicit sex Walter Salles dramatizes, much of it drawn from juicy swathes of Jack Kerouac's only recently published original scroll.

Even when Wagner & Me seems uneven as an art historical study, it's fairly successful as a travelogue.