Bullet Collector

This aggressive and disturbing Russian drama follows a 14-year-old boy's (Ruslan Nazarenko) slow descent into violent madness. Trapped in a horrible domestic environment—his mother cannot control her anger and his stepfather loathes him—and subject to bullying at school, the boy loses himself in violent fantasies involving deadly criminal action. His life becomes even more chaotic when he is sent to a reform school—a seething environment in which his fantasies blur with his grim surroundings. But is all of this really happening, or is the young man permanently lost in a private world of outlandish lies and movie-style mayhem? Bullet Collector is the debut feature of director Alexander Vartanov, who invests his work with significant artistic flourishes, including richly textured black-and-white cinematography, a twisting screenplay (that somehow shoehorns a tender romantic subplot into the tumult), and stylish graphic violence. The result is often bewildering and hard to watch—imagine Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows seen through a Quentin Tarantino viewfinder—but Bullet Collector does maintain a distinctive vibe. Recommended. (P. Hall)