The Kino Lorber BlogThe Best in World Cinema

Kino International’s universally praised DOGTOOTH is Greece’s official nomination to the Academy Awards in 2011.

Here are some excerpt reviews from the film’s Theatrical run:

As DOGTOOTH’s carefully cultivated fictional world begins to unravel, the fallout accelerates too fast for anyone on screen to cope. The truth goes hand-in-glove with a feeling of blind panic. It’s an exhilaratingly unpredictable experience, and not an easy one to shake. - Scott Tobias, The Onion A.V.Club

For those inclined to put it to use, DOGTOOTH offers a unique, acute and profoundly unsettling circus mirror vividly reflecting the darkest aspects of that most frequently and mostly tiresomely cinematically depicted first tier of all societies — the family. - Bruce Bennett, IFC.com

Director Giorgos Lanthimos lays out the rules largely through action rather than exposition, which allows DOGTOOTH to play as a richly satisfying, blackly comic mystery in spite of its delayed, horror-sourced housebreak plot. - Karina Longworth, The Village Voice

DOGTOOTH is so suggestive and frightening, it invites solving, but only by the brave. …Undeniably, though, DOGTOOTH is about something everyone will get, namely the way sex writes its own rules, no matter how strictly curtailed. Summon up the courage and go. - Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

Kino International, in collaboration with Viso Trailers, is proud to announce the online premiere of the U.S. trailer for Yorgos Lanthimos’ award-winning feature film Dogtooth (2009).

A hyper-stylized mixture of physical violence and verbal comedy, Dogtooth is a darkly funny look at three teenagers confined to their parents’ isolated country estate and kept under strict rule and regimen – an inscrutable scenario that suggests a warped experiment in social conditioning and control.

Terrorized into submission by their father, the children spend their days devising their own games and learning an invented vocabulary (a salt shaker is a “telephone,” an armchair is “the sea”) – until a trusted outsider, brought in to satisfy the son’s libidinal urges, plans the seeds of rebellion by trading VHS tapes for sexual favors. (partially adapted from the New Directors/New Films catalog)

Release date: June 25, 2010 (Cinema Village)
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Distributor: Kino International
Website: www.kino.com/dogtooth

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