Wild Tales

Argentinian writer-director Damián Szifron's black comedy anthology, which played festivals throughout 2014 and was nominated for a Best Foreign Film award at last month's Oscars, is the pinnacle of contemporary revenge films, the granddaddy, the godfather, the boss, the Great Pumpkin. Wild Tales is the revenge film to end all revenge films, a glorious and bonkers blast of visual creativity and storytelling energy, and one of the most purely entertaining films of the year. If the naughty-boy, early-1990s oeuvres of Pedro Almodovar (who also produced) and Quentin Tarantino were somehow able to copulate, then Wild Tales would be their grossly beautiful sextuplet offspring. Wild Tales shuffles juvenile amorality and hand-of-God sermonizing into the same deck, but it's perfectly pitched, as though the funniest kid in your high school became Scheherazade for two hours. Like a vicious predator, Wild Tales sinks its claws into your neck before you even see it coming. D.B.