Lilya 4-Ever (2003)

Feel-Good Dept.: If your thing is watching a movie wherein the entire Western world conspires to drop a Cleveland steamer on a 16-year-old girl, have at it. Personally, I would hope that if the films I watch are to aspire to anything, it would be to a message more revelatory than "Life sucks, get a helmet". Not that I haven't appreciated downbeat or nihilistic cinema before (refer to my undying appreciation of Requiem for a Dream), but this one-track crap ain't cutting it. Director Lukas Moodysson stacks the deck so heavily against his protagonist that it upends any point he was trying to make -- his crude, labored determinism turns the film into a lifeless hermetic experiment in social realism. Granted, I know things like this happen in real life and I'm sympathetic to that and I guess Moodysson should be commended for trying to bring this to our attention. But I'd much rather he'd have done it with more grace and less wallowing. He comes across as a thug with an Arriflex. (Besides, isn't this why they make movies like Born Into Brothels?)

Grade: D+