Cowards Bend the Knee or The Blue Hands

There's a new visual idea every second, each teeming with energy, pitch-dark comedy, and inspired cinematic lunacy.

What's truly extraordinary about this movie--which strikes me on two viewings as Maddin's masterpiece--is that it not only plays like a dream but feels like one.

There is also something rather splendid about this extended-play peep show, as if Mr. Maddin had stumbled across a hitherto lost archive of cinema's less-than-innocent past. What makes all this nostalgia for a movie history that never happened is that, as is always the case with Mr. Maddin's work, it's executed with more love than irony and not a whit of derision.

Abortion, incest, infidelity, revenge, and hockey collide at a fever pitch, juxtaposed with such frantic energy that they're pushed to the level of high comedy, funniest at its most dramatic.

The results are always visually arresting, while the narrative, even by Maddin standards, is completely out in the ozone.

If you're a fan of Maddin's expressionist style, you'll find the humor within. Everyone else will be scratching their heads, despite Maddin's extraordinary visual imagination.

The overall feel is phantasmagoric--pitched, like most of Maddin's work, in the style of a half-remembered late silent feature or early talkie.