Le Dernier Combat: Luc Besson

Luc Besson's Le Dernier Combat is at its best when it's at its weirdest: sudden rainstorms of fish and rocks; strange cave-paintings on building walls; a captive dwarf forced to retrieve water from a sunken well. The setting is rather standard for bizarro post-apocalypse movies: a nondescript disaster has turned the world into a desert, killed almost all of the women, and left all survivors incapable of speaking. But Besson's dark, quirky vision manages to keep the film from collapsing into a pile of trite mythologisms: a new Adam and Eve; a two-dimensional Brute who only wishes to kill and destroy; a lone wanderer seeking a new home. Beautifully shot and ambitious, Le Dernier Combat is a low-budget, low-key triumph.

8/10