Michael Ledo The police accuse Bible study teacher Dror (Rotem Keinan) of molesting and killing three young girls. His "questioning-questioning" known as torture gets recorded and uploaded. The suspect is set free, but the consequences disrupts everyone's life. Later the father of one of the daughters captures both the policeman and Dror with his own plans in mind.One of the big plot holes is what was the CSI evidence? No DNA on the girls? Was Dror's place combed for fibers, hairs, prints? The film is made in Israel and is in subscripts. There are some attempts at humor in this torture drama, but the delivery and timing seemed off. I felt like I was being told a funny story by someone who messes it up.The film was a big hit at the 2013 Israeli Film Academy winning many awards (not best picture). It is highly rated by critics and fans. The film lacked the big twist and gave us a small, almost obligatory one instead. While it copies some aspect of Tarantino, you can detect it is a knock-off like a fuzzy print DVD.I think a better twist would have been if the dad was the killer and he got the innocent Dror to confess, the cop then kills Dror, the audience sees that the dad was the killer...then you go to the second twist ending as the cop is arrested for murder.Guide: No f-bomb, sex, or nudity. Some blood squirt. The torture scenes were either from a distant or showed you the after effects...except for maybe that one thing.

Red-Barracuda A few years ago I saw the film Rabies (2010) which was notable for being the first horror film to emerge from Israel. This fact made it instantly quite interesting, the movie itself was more decent than great although it did have the distinctive factor of being a maniac-in-the-woods film where the killer is not all that important and is merely a catalyst for a tide of criminal and homicidal behaviour carried out by all the other 'innocent' characters. So it was a film that did present a familiar story in an unusual way, which is exactly what its directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado have done with their follow up Big Bad Wolves. The story here has a young girl go missing during a game of hide and seek. The chief suspect is taken to an abandoned warehouse and roughly questioned by police. The damaging footage is secretly filmed and put on the internet and the cop who had exacted the most violence on the suspect is taken off homicide; this leads him to go rogue, kidnap the suspect and try to force a confession out of him. The situation gets far more volatile when the father of the murdered girl turns up and enacts his own even fiercer brand of vigilantism.This could have been a typical serial killer thriller but what makes it a bit unusual is that the audience are never at any point told just why the police or the vengeful father are so convinced that the suspect is the child killer. By withholding this information the film-makers create a tension that plays upon our uncertainty. It makes the torturous interrogation methods used seem horrendous and it makes us think that the accused should be given a fairer hearing. Quite cleverly, this decision strips us of any pre-conceived ideas and takes away a lot of inbuilt prejudice that many of us would carry into a highly unpleasant case involving a potential paedophile child killer, the result is it makes us more clearly question both the vigilante and heavy-handed police methods. As it transpires in the story, the torture doesn't actually ultimately help find the dead or missing girl.I would definitely consider this movie a step up from Rabies (2010). Quentin Tarantino had even declared it his favourite film of 2013, which I don't think it would be unfair to say is certainly something of an overstatement. Nevertheless, it is an interesting thriller that leads its audience down a carefully planned path that makes them question certain impulses and assumptions. I'm not so sure, however, on the use of black comedy here though. It felt a bit out of place considering the grim nature of the subject matter underpinning events. Still, I guess it did alleviate what could otherwise have been exceptionally full-on material. There are instances of some very wince-inducing violence it has to be said, although it stops short of truly going into torture-themed horror territory. It's more of a very dark thriller about three bad fathers. It ends on an unusual low-key but nihilistic tone, which admittedly makes us then reassess our judgements from earlier yet again and some actions that beforehand had seemed very bad now seem a lot more justifiable. Yeah, this deceptively simple movie is one that gets you thinking alright.

Ed-Shullivan BBW deserves a 7 out of 10 and I would have rated it higher if the screen writer would have made a somewhat greater effort to avoid what I considered a disappointing ending to the film that just came out flat. There is some very good acting between the three main characters as well as by the supporting cast. Continual suspense is maintained and the film is sprinkled throughout with a bit of dark humour to allow the audience not to take the film too seriously. The film does not rely on extensive blood and gore neither by the serial killer Dror, or by his own captors and tormentors, Gidi and Micki. I was quite impressed with how the suspense was maintained all the way through the film as well as a few slick twists and turns such as when Gidi's father arrives at the cottage and discovers what his son Gidi has been up to.The trick I believe to delivering a great film is to have the audience feeling good about how the film ends such that we would like to see a sequel, or leaving us with the desire to view the film a second time. In this case, I found the films closing scenes were a big let down mainly because the rest of the film was so suspenseful and entertaining. Upon leaving the film what a screen writer really does not want to hear is the audience saying "well that was a dumb ending wasn't it?"This is a high rising film which came up flat at the end. I rated the film a 7 out of 10.

alshwenbear1 It sounds like a comedy, and certainly, the way the movie plays undermines the seriousness of the subject, (no spoilers here!) but that is okay, because not always do things have to be so gritty, dark and brutal.In a way, "Big Bad Wolves" is the antithesis of "Prisoners" (2013), and this is not a bad thing, because "Big Bad Wolves" does not toy with our emotions, anger or despair, but with our curiosity, with our doubts, all the way to the final scene that fades into the elegance of irony and what we already knew.The acting and the atmosphere creates what I crave most in a film, and this is: unpredictability; who really did it?, why?, where? These questions became irrelevant, because we are just in it for the ride that provides a good movie like this.