Venice Review: Jerzy Skolimowski's Brash, Disposable '11 Minutes'

If it's hard to account for which films get booed in Venice, Jerzy Skolimowski's inexplicably well-received "11 Minutes" proves that it's just as surprising what gets cheered. A vapid exercise in borderline kitschy style over substance that really only has its high-concept format to recommend it (and yet goes on to play fast and loose with even that internal logic) it's a set of interlocking/overlapping stories set nominally around a particular town square in Warsaw, on a fateful day between 5 and 5.11pm.

Except the stories, each more cliche melodramatic than the last, don't overlap in a way that feels anything but coincidental, many are left undeveloped, and actually it doesn't all take place during those 11 minutes, so one is forced to wonder what the point of the whole thing is. It's edited and shot with appropriate kicky dynamism, and an eye for a slick, occasionally surreal visual, but it's nothing that hasn't been done better or more efficiently elsewhere,for example...