The Wolfpack

"The Wolfpack" is such a strange movie that I had a hard time watching it. It's about a set of boy siblings, and the family that keeps them locked in a Manhattan apartment. Eventually, they venture outside. It's a documentary. I vacillated between enjoying the film's refusal to be a traditional by the book documentary and feeling annoyed with its refusal to spell everything out for me. It's more like an art film, in a way, an assemblage. Still, it's very peculiar -- you kind of wonder: Do I want to see this? Sometimes, I wasn't so sure. What's happened is distressing, yet you almost feel at times like director Crystal Moselle doesn't want to look at that dead on, but instead in passing glances. The parents are a mess. The reenactments of films the boys undertake to escape their confines is intriguing; the final film within a film is probably the most beautiful thing in it. I'm not sure what else is. The boys graduate from their prison childhoods, and it's very sweet to see them seeing their first movie in a movie theater, but the viewer remains a spectator, far removed from whatever happened on the LES.

Buy THE TUMOR! "This is one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."