“Bacurau Is The Best John Carpenter Movie Carpenter Didn’t Actually Make”

It’s weird, isn’t it, how some filmmakers with clear love for a specific decade of cinema, or a specific director, will make their own movies, and their own movies will feel and sound and look an awful lot like the movies that influenced them, with very little variation in style and aesthetic and technique and themes; and how others will make their own movies, but sussing out their influences takes actual work? 

Rambling again. I think what I’m getting at here is that Bacurau is, beneath the surface, “the Brazilian Assault on Precinct 13,” which is a) a fair comparison, and b) also totally unfair to what Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles have accomplished here. Don’t think of Bacurau as Brazil’s Assault on Precinct 13. Think of Bacurau as Brazil’s Assault on Precinct 13 in an alternate universe where Carpenter never made Assault on Precinct 13 in the first place.

You can read my full review over at Polygon.