theskylabadventure Bullhead is an extremely frustrating film. It sports an incredible performance by Matthias Schoenaerts as a lonely Belgian farmer struggling to cope with an emotionally isolated existence and haunted by an insurmountably troubled past. To say any more would be a total spoiler. As a piece of character drama, this is seriously affecting stuff, made all the more distressing by a truly world- class performance. This would have been enough for a terrific movie.However, the waters are muddied by various other superfluous plot strands; an investigation into the use of steroids in beef, local gangsters killing cops, low-rent hoodlums selling stolen tyres, a gay police informant who also happens to be a long-lost childhood friend, and a slightly implausible love interest. While any of these ideas may have borne fruit in their own movie, the result here is definitely less than the sum of its parts, not least because the aptly sombre tone of the main story is compromised by the intrusion of these other events.Michaël R. Roskam is definitely a director to watch, and I suspect Bullhead will become an interesting curiosity to visit in the context of a great director taking his first steps. Ultimately, the weakness here is in the writing. Roskam's next movie was 'The Drop' (with Matthias Schoenaerts again awesome in a supporting role), which was adapted from a short story by Dennis Lehane and, for my money, is an infinitely superior movie, largely because it doesn't suffer from the same cluttered over-plotting. Like Anton Corbijn , tone and emotion are clearly Roskam's forté and I for one am excited to see what he delivers next.Technical merits for the blu ray are first rate, and the 'making of' piece is watchable, if nothing special.

clifee57 Outstanding on many levels, i was left stunned by its impressive impact, especially on what this film says about human relationships. The protagonist says to his childhood (true)friend near the end "all i've known is animals....i feel like a bull....i haven't lived a natural life.....to protect a wife, children..." His friend embraced him in empathy, but this was questioned "are you a faggot". Any sign of apparent "weakness" ie. tender emotions, are suspect in this world. He lost his testicles as a child and the treatment he received from his culture was utterly insufficient to compensate for this in many key area's. The response to the traumatic incident completely omitted any restorative justice, leaving him at the mercy of vengeful passions, though his father blindly raged for "justice". At least the child did get a sense off a kind of love there. The family were just left to manage as best they could, in the spirit of the worse kind of "independence", which is another aspect of the wider culture, it's just a question of degree. How can someone inject themselves into a permanent stupor for years and this not be inquired into. Well in a world where introspection and emotional intimacy are marginalized, to be remote from the alpha male world of grunt work, brothels, rat race commerce and criminal tendencies, a wholesome human expression is prevented. The talk of only knowing animals said a lot to me about how our society as a whole functions too much on an animal level and has yet to give birth to its humanness. The child longingly looking at his adult version at the end was just heartbreaking and for me at least, reminded me to cherish our young, to give the utmost support to all their development as a rounded human being.

punishmentpark Now, what do we have here? On the one hand, we start off hearing a gloomy monologue of the main character speaking of fate, how it can not be avoided and everything will turn to *poop* - as Belgian farmers generally may or may not be inclined to believe...? Then straight after, we are pulled into the story of the hormone mafia (to increase meat production, cows are given hormone injections, and the murder of an investigator is based on the true case of Karel van Noppen), but pay attention, because it is kind of hard to follow. Then, after some time, we go back twenty years in time and learn of a completely different story, which also goes back to the opening monologue of the film, and (among other things) a connection between the main character and a criminal / informant is explained.These two stories could have worked together, but it just hardly feels rightly combined in this film. At times I wished they had made this into a TV-series, because many characters and issues deserved so much more elaborating. And, I speak of two stories, but there's actually much more going on (for instance a sort of love story and the police doing a sting operation), so 129 minutes is the least they could have used.The most important scene in all this seems to be the brutal beating of main character's privates Jacky at a young age. It's sheer shock value can't be denied, and everything after seems like kid's stuff(!); in any case it puts the story of the hormone mafia (and the police chasing them) in a shady corner. If only that story had died down in the film, but unfortunately, it didn't.And then there are these strangely humorous (I do believe they might be quite Belgian) moments, e.g. the religious vision of Jacky, the gay man (accidentally?) farting on the phone and the police woman's reaction to it, the main character asking the same (gay) man if he's gay and the gay man trying to hide his true identity; in themselves not really funny moments, but more reminiscent of a film like Fargo, where funny meets real, sort of.Finally, the gloomy look of the film is pretty much spot on, I enjoyed it, as well as pretty much all of the acting. But all in all, this is a tough one to give a good rating. There's just too much mixing in the story lines to be truly convinced, although I did easily sit it out.

palmiro I found this film remarkable for its ability to stir feelings of sympathy for a kind of character who seems utterly brutish and unredeemable. Jacky is a brute, the kind of man who all too often resorts to abominable acts of violence when he's aroused. And yet, thanks to the portrait of Jacky drawn by the director and by the actor, we cannot help but feel great sorrow for him. Yes, Jacky does terrible, terrible things over the course of the film, but by the end I was sobbing for him. Maybe it's simply "tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner", but whatever that emotion was I felt at the film's end it was something that revealed to me (and one would hope to all who see this film) a terrifying and redemptive bond of common humanity.