Wild Tales Review

Damián Szifron's anthology opens, before the credits, with its best joke: the passengers on a flight discover, one by one, that they all know the same man, and that each of them once wronged him. The five stories that follow widen the lens on the same impulse, from a roadside diner where a cook offers to poison a loan shark, through a road rage duel on an empty desert highway, to Ricardo Darín's demolitions expert declaring war on a towing company and the bureaucracy behind it.

The escalation is plotted like slapstick and landed like tragedy. Oscar Martínez anchors the darkest story, a rich father haggling over the price of a scapegoat for his son's hit and run, and Érica Rivas walks off with the finale as a bride who learns at her own reception that her husband has been unfaithful. Javier Juliá's camera is sleek and gleeful, and Gustavo Santaolalla's score keeps its tongue in its cheek.

Not every tale is equal, and the middle stretch hits the note of vengeance twice. But Time's Richard Corliss called it the year's most fearlessly funny film, it was nominated for the foreign language Oscar, and it set a box office record in Argentina.