Posted from Cannes on 5.20.16: “I’m crestfallen about Paul Schrader‘s Dog Eat Dog — a lurid, blood-splattered genre satire. It’s not that I don’t get the fuck-all, porno-violent attitude. I just don’t understand how or why a good fellow like Schrader would succumb to this kind of gaudy nihilism with such mystifying gusto. He’s taken a 1997 Eddie Bunker crime novel, which I haven’t read but is reputedly grounded in brutal reality, and made a dark, sloppy comedy of excess that only the animals will like and which only Cannes critics will praise with a semi-straight face.

Dog Eat Dog – Trailer [VO] by Filmosphere

“I’ll admit that Dog Eat Dog hits the amusement button maybe three or four times (Schrader’s dry performance as a crime lord is one of the few elements that satisfy) but mainly it’s a clumsy, splattery, tonally-chaotic wallow. I know it sounds unkind but the words ‘diarrhea dump’ came to mind as I sat in the balcony this morning.”

Schrader Indiewire quote: “I wanted to push the envelope, to never be boring, to take this as far as it could go without breaking the conception of the material, and I think ‘Dog’ was something that really enabled this. Every department head, we said, ‘Go for it. Take it as far as you can go’ so the movie is playing at eleven in every scene.”