Thanks for the memories!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The Greek director Yorgos Lathimos may possess the most perverse and idiosyncratic imagination in movies. After his Oscar-nominated breakthrough movie "Dogtooth" and prior to his international hit "The Lobster" he made "Alps", a completely off-the-wall 'comedy', (you might have trouble finding the jokes), about a group calling themselves 'The Alps', who stand in for the recently deceased in order to help the relatives through the grieving process. An American writer/director might have made this into a sci-fi/horror film along the lines of Frankenheimer's "Seconds" but Lathimos treats it like a fairy-tale, albeit not one you might tell your children. This movie has a surreal sensibility that is both disquieting and blackly funny. On hindsight, "The Lobster" might seem like a natural progression though God knows where Lathimos might go from here.

What happens when people insist on controlling one another? When they see the other only in terms of roles and obligations, not as individuals? When the primary interaction between those with power in relationships and those without is that the powerful take what they want, insist on conventional behavior from others and deny the weaker ones their desires and opportunities. When those denied must submit or die? What are the effects of even small acts of kindness? What is the effect of really seeing the other. Satisfying individual needs? This movie aims directly at the intellect and the gut, using a strikingly unusual metaphor as storyline. If you read the other reviews, you'll see it leaves many disappointed, irritated and confused. If you love patterns and puzzles you may enjoy this. Eventually. During the movie I was repeatedly briefly enraged, mostly just puzzled. Immediately after watching it, I wondered why the director thought he was entitled to waste 90 minutes of his viewer's lives with such coldness, sterility and artifice. By the time I woke up the next morning, the pieces began to fall into place. The actions and interactions of the gymnast and trainer during the first and last scenes, and the reason that the two scenes differ, encapsulate everything. After a lot of thought and piecing together, I see the movie as a brilliant piece of art. Unpleasantly, disturbingly, heart-rendingly brilliant.

Giorgos Lanthimos wowed critics with his somewhat entertaining freakshow Dogtooth a while back. This is his follow-up, and it represents all of the aspects of Dogtooth I hated and had none of the (very minor) strengths. It is, first and foremost, an enormous bore. The actual content of the film is negligible and it's absolutely full of pregnant pauses and unnecessary bits. What content there is is awful. It's a film about people who do things that real people would never do and acting ways people would never act. I frankly just don't see the point in any of this. The story revolves around a group of people (calling themselves the Alps) who will, for a fee, take the place of deceased loved ones. Like Dogtooth, there's a lot of nudity and humiliating sex, but there's nothing salacious or shocking here. It's all very clinical. About the only good thing I can say about the film is that Lanthimos definitely has a good eye for visuals. Really, though, I'd rate this as the worst movie I've seen from 2012 so far.

With the singularly compelling premise of a mysterious group offering to take over the roles of recently deceased people to provide relief for their loved ones, it came as quite the shock to me that Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos's follow-up to his 2009 Oscar-nominated "Dogtooth" (one of my all-time favorites) ultimately failed at living up to its concept.Throughout the entirety of "Alps", I felt I was gazing in awe at a beautiful seed sadly incapable of germination. The film barely got anywhere while maintaining an incredibly slow pace and irritating visual style consisting of incessantly restrained deep-focus cinematography. There was so much potential wasted on scenes far too peculiar and insignificant to add any depth to the story or further develop the characters. Seldom did anything rightfully earn its place in the film; the multiple sex scenes seemed to be there with the sole purpose of being extremely awkward and obscene, while all the attempts at absurd humor felt slightly forced and weren't as effective as they should have been due to the narrative's intermittent solemnity.This brings me to the film's greatest problem, which was that— on top of struggling to find its own voice and tone in its ridiculously irrational approach— it never really figured out what message it wanted to convey to its audience. Evidently Lanthimos was trying to say something about human nature and the craziness of consumer society, but he didn't succeed in delivering his thoughts coherently this time around. I hate comparing, but I must say I found the profound social critique that seeped through the bizarre surface of "Dogtooth" to be far superior in elaboration.The end result of "Alps" was a confused, detached (albeit well-acted, especially by Aggeliki Papoulia) jumble beyond anyone's realm of comprehension, so overwhelmingly filled with unjustified senselessness that the most I could do was simply sit and stare at the screen, patiently awaiting some real substance, only to be disappointed by sheer staleness.I suppose I somewhat admired "Alps" for all that it could've been following its eccentric uniqueness, but I can't see how anyone in their right mind could have truly enjoyed it.