Crash (1996)

For a movie obsessed with the connection between sexual intercourse and car accidents, David Cronenberg's Crash could hardly be more stationary.

While the director remains firmly behind the wheel for the first hour or so, he cracks up toward the end with sequences that send the film and the audience into a ditch.

It's a dark, disturbing, languorous movie, as ludicrous, hermetic and repetitive, perhaps, as Ballard's original, but admirably assured and true to itself.

Mr. Cronenberg, for once oddly inhibited by brazen subject matter, has made a meticulously stylized and controlled film that leaves many of its characters' ideas muffled and lacks the true audacity its material demands.

"Crash" doesn't extend beyond its most immediate sensationalism. When the movie does attempt to find a theme, it slams into a brick wall of mumbo-jumbo.

So far from being involving or compelling, so intentionally disconnected from any kind of recognizable emotion, that by comparison David Lynch's removed "Lost Highway" plays like "Lassie Come Home."

[A] necessarily disturbing and equally profound inquiry into human desire, however self-destructive.

With Crash, David Cronenberg drives mainstream cinema over the edge.

Crash is a mutant work of art -- a bracing splash of ice water.

Wildly unwatchable, as if someone had made Andy Warhol's Frankenstein without being in on the joke.

It's the cold survival logic of Darwin, where libertarians leave their past behind as if it were dead.

A stylish, intriguing and typically warped vision that hybridises the imaginations of Ballard and Cronenberg.