The Salton Sea

As a gallery of the grotesque, however, the cinematic equivalent of a Joe Coleman painting or Adam Parfrey publication, The Salton Sea is a blast. more

It contains one element of startling originality: its bad guy, nicknamed Pooh-Bear and played by Vincent D'Onofrio in a great weird demented giggle of a performance; imagine a Batman villain cycled through the hallucinations of "Requiem for a Dream." more

Strikes out toward freakishly original territory after all. Fans of the off-beat, your movie has arrived. more

A slick, stylish hardboiled caper filtered through a druggy haze and borrowing a bit of a "Memento" revenge motif and "Pulp Fiction" playfulness. more

Unlike in many thrillers, the movie doesn't sandbag us with one last, cheap twist at the end. The Salton Sea contains its share of surprises, but none of them feels forced or artificial. more

A twisty, showy, atmosphere-saturated drama that revels (in a post-post-Tarantino-and-''Trainspotting'' way) in sadism and in-your-face seediness -- and attracts a cast of coolios primed to play extreme. more

It's Vincent D'Onofrio as Pooh-Bear, a drug lord who's snorted so much meth his nose had to be replaced by a plastic one, who kicks ass. more

For all its faults, is a solid piece of dirty work. more

Might be thought of as "Memento" for people who didn't get "Memento."

A commercial Hollywood movie without pretensions. If there's no art here, it's still a good yarn - which is nothing to sneeze at these days. more

Amazon, you need a sixth star to do full justice to this edgy, innovative masterpiece of ensemble acting. That lead actor Val Kilmer can shine so brilliantly amidst the endless stream of first rate supporting actors proves he is not only an actor of supreme ability, but a catalyst who has brought about small miracles in the roles of, among others, Sarsgaard, Wong, D'Onofrio, Plummer, Unger, Guzman --well the list is long and simply mind-boggling. The film was released in only four or five major cities and dropped. How the producers of this film could have been so dense in promoting it is... more

This 2002 film is a rather weird and grotesque story set in the world of drugs. Val Kilmer is cast as a former trumpet player on a downward drug spiral. He's a middleman dealer, a police informant and a speed freak himself. The drug scenes are lurid and explicit. And the violence never stops. It's also a roller coaster ride for the audience, with a complicated plot that finally makes sense. There are also special effects and moments to make me cringe. Vincent D'Onofrio is cast as a demented drug dealer who has lost his nose due to his habit. He's a sadist who boasts about torturing people... more

Glad to see most of the reviews are favorable- "The Salton Sea" is one of my favorite movies. Why? The movie tells a special story in a unique way. Danny (AKA Tom) is on a personal mission that takes him into the squalidity of addiction and crime in LA. The story is unfolded in tangental vignettes, hyper-bizarre incidents and vivid flashbacks, and those of you with a keen eye for detail will recognize the logic of how and why the plotline is revealed this way. A lot of people will find some of the characters strange and over-the-top, and some of the incidents shocking, but that is the... more