text size

Review: Bullhead

Updated: Tuesday, February 21 2012, 08:52 PM CST
Grade: B

Bullhead is an Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film and is marketed by Austin’s own Alamo Drafthouse’s distribution company, Drafthouse Films.  It seems that most foreign films have dark lighting and I am really biased when it comes to the brilliant lighting from mainstream Hollywood.  In this Belgium film, the darkness covers you with a blanket of depression.  Nonetheless, it works here because Bullhead is a tragic tale of a cattle farmer named Jacky Vanmarsenille.

In Bullhead, Jacky is approached to take part in a shameful deal with an infamous West-Flemish beef trader who wants to inject the cows to make them grow faster, meaning higher profits.  He agrees to the deal, but soon after, a federal policeman who is trying to uncover the hormone mafia is found dead.  The story switched back and forth from Jacky being a kid going through an incident that changes his life forever and causing him to take hormones now in his adult life.  That one afternoon is what has shaped him to be the man that he is today.

Bullhead is a moving film that will make you have many emotions.  It deals with crime and punishment, but also lost innocence.  There are strong parallels between Jacky injecting the cattle with hormones.  Even though he knows what he is doing is unhealthy to the cows, why would he care if he’s injecting himself with steroids?

To watch the trailer, click here.

Ken The Critic’s Movie Review Grading Scale

A – Superb and solid; a movie that will be etched in your mind 10 years from now

B – Good movie, so good in fact that you would want to see it again before it’s out of the theaters; the story may drag in places

C – Average, entertaining at parts; you might want to wait and rent it

D – Lacks a lot from entertainment, plot, realism, development, etc.

F – Terrible and you will want to walk out of the movie; no redemptive qualities whatsoever   Review: Bullhead