'Wild Tales' is nasty fun

CRITICS HAVE been good to "Wild Tales," perhaps because they see what happens, in the hair-raising opening sequence, to those who give bad reviews.

But the movie (Oscar nominated from Argentina), a series of acidly funny and often violent vignettes, deserves its praise.

The movie is subtitled, but anyone can relate to its sardonic, Serling-esque stories and settings - an airplane, a cafe, lonely highway, the DMV, a wedding.

"Wild Tales" has been described as a movie about revenge, but I'd refine that to say that the movie gives us variations on the theme of outrage, the world's most fashionable and contagious emotion.

A man in a luxury car is cut off by a belligerent "redneck," leading to a roadside fight to the death that plays like Robert Rodriguez by way of Buster Keaton.

In another episode, a fellow (Ricardo Darin) runs afoul of the Buenos Aires Parking Authority, apparently no less bureaucratic and Kafka-esque than our own.

His retribution is so cinematically satisfying, the character has become a folk hero in Argentina.

The movie touches on themes of money, power, elitism, corruption, but in ways that play tricks with our sympathies - watch the way money figures in the legal wrangling behind a fatal hit-and-run.

The stories could have settled for mere exploitation, but they grow more complex as they go, until the final bit, when a bride (Erica Rivas) and groom enact the entire arc of a passionate, fraught marriage during the bouquet toss and bridal dance.

Here the characters get past their base impulses to a place marginally more civilized, if no less bloody.

When you see the groom pick up a knife, halfway between the bride and the wedding cake, you don't know what to expect, but in this collection of wildly vengeful tales, maybe reconciliation is the wildest thing of all.

Online: ph.ly/Movies