Julien Donkey-Boy

In his second directorial effort, writer/director Harmony Korine embraces the hyper-realist aesthetic of Lars Von Trier's Dogma 95 film movement, which mandates handheld photography using only available lighting, among other restrictions. As in the controversial Gummo (1997), Korine abandons ...more

More exhausting than elucidative, the follow-up to Gummo finds writer/director Harmony Korine again mining his tropes of dysfunction, disease, and depravity. This time, however, he foregoes much of the surreal comedy and visual punch of the earlier film. With a title character loosely based on the director's own uncle, it's no surprise that Julien Donkey-Boy seems to have more sympathy for its protagonist than Gummo did for the majority of its hapless characters. Yet the endless badgering of ...more