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Kiss or Kill
*Premiere*
Winner of Five Australian Academy Awards, Including Best Picture of 1997
Kiss or Kill
| "A Sizzling Tour-de-Force!" -- Playboy | "Utterly Fresh and Invigorating!" -- The New York Times |
Imagine an Alfred Hitchcock version of Terrence Malick's Badlands as rescripted by Quentin Tarantino and you're in the general vicinity of this offbeat road movie. "The casually sulfurous tone of the Australian film noir Kiss or Kill is set in its opening scene... in which a little girl named Nikki watches traumatized as her mother... answers a knock on the door and goes up in flames from a killer's tossed match. Flash forward: the grown-up Nikki (Frances O'Connor) is now a cold-blooded grifter in cahoots with her boyfriend, Al (Matt Day)... One night, their mark, a lawyer visiting Adelaide to do business with a popular local sports hero named Zipper Doyle (Barry Langrishe), dies by accident. Smashing open his briefcase, the robbers discover a video of Zipper having sex with a little boy... For the rest of the movie, they are pursued across the country both by the police and by Zipper, who is determined to retrieve the video at any cost... Writer-director Bill Bennett makes something utterly fresh and, for all its scent of evil, invigorating out of [the material]... Acted and edited in a jagged semi-documentary style... Kiss or Kill borrows its hopped-up rhythm from [its protagonist's] empty-headed nervousness. The territory they traverse is a grandly picturesque wasteland of cheesy diners, motels and last-chance gas stations... The world [the film] imagines is a place of such all encompassing treachery that a simple knock on the door... can make everything that matters go up in smoke." -- Stephen Holden, The New York Times.
(Australia, 1997, 96 min.)
18 Accompaniment -- disturbing scenes, violence, suggestive scenes.
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