This was originally done as an art installation, so it makes sense that it is Maddin's most experimental and challenging film. Consequentially, in my opinion it is ultimately also his least satisfying feature work that i have seen to date. However, that said it is still full of all the typical Maddin touches that one could expect from his films, so it is hardly a failure by anyone else's standards.

I love the aesthetic of this film, how it crosses silent film techniques with low budget filmmaking and then edits it at a million miles an hour jumping and flickering around as if this is all in someone's head jumping from thought to thought on a whim and repeating moments, getting stuck, focusing in on something &c. Cowards is both incredibly fun and very disturbing, even nightmarish, joyously demented, delightfully odd.

Ok, I give up. That's now three exercises in laborious eccentricity I've sat through, courtesy of Guy Maddin. I've only liked his short, The Heart of the World, and his ballet, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary. Everything else, including this one, has worn my patience quickly with gobs of camp, vamping, and studious weirdness. There's just nothing here for me to latch onto.

"Cowards Bend the Knee is paradoxically retrograde and ultramodern." - Eric Henderson

"Amusing over-the-top melodrama with sudden bizarre laughs like when two men are showering and in a gay impulse he touches the other's behind as if it were a doorbell. The big flaw here is the frenetic editing, which greatly over-uses cuts, jumpy scenes, rapid montages and intertitles, making this movie hard on the eyes and brain and which doesn't let any atmosphere build."

Overflowing with memories, images, cultural fragments, and energy, and edited with enough fervor to give a Soviet a heart attack. I'd love to see it in its installation form.

Fucking weird as hell, but if you're familiar with Maddin, that's not a bad thing. It's not for everyone, but I liked it.

Another twisted melodrama from autobiographical fragments of Maddin's life. Sort of a surrealist version of The Hands of Orlac. I have to resist the urge to label Maddin's work as "random", because when you describe it, it sounds like gibberish. But it all makes perfect sense at the time. Okay maybe not PERFECT sense, but some kind of sense. Not as captivating as Brand, but at least with Maddin you know you're gonna see stuff you've never seen before. I was a bit put off by the rapid editing.