EXTRAORDINARY STORIES

Filmmaker Mariano Llinás occupies a crucial yet unclassifiable place in contemporary cinema, reinventing traditional narrative in bold defiance of the vanguard and mainstream alike. Rejecting both the minimalist formalism of much auteur cinema and the maximalist THEMES of awards-driven movies, Llinás embraces cinema as a different kind of narrative art: intoxicating storytelling in a constant state of radical potential.

In his astonishing debut EXTRAORDINARY STORIES, three unconnected tales begin innocently and veer into ever stranger realms. X arrives in a small town and witnesses a violent act; Z takes the job of a dead manager and discovers a notebook written in code and a map; H is sent down a river to investigate mysterious monoliths along its shore. Secret identities, missing persons, lost treasures, exotic beasts and desperate criminals become threads in a grand tapestry of mysteries.

There is a literary taproot to Llinás’ deeply cinematic imagination. Borges, Pynchon and Bolaño are clear inspirations, but so are the Romanticism of Robert Louis Stevenson, the adventures of Jack London and the fantasies of Jules Verne. Closer still to the palpitating heart of EXTRAORDINARY STORIES are the many films Llinás seems to have lovingly devoured and reconstituted: genre films of every kind, especially the deliberately minor, unfettered B-films of the studio era, made with a freedom unavailable to bigger pictures—the kind of films, as Llinás says, “that the Americans used to make with their eyes closed and now cannot or do not want to anymore.”

EXTRAORDINARY STORIES renews the promise and adventure of cinematic narrative.