Dog Days (2001)

A Grand Jury Prize winner at the Venice Film Festival, Ulrich Seidl’s enormously controversial Dog Days (2001) is a scathing look at suburban rot. Set in a bleakly depressing town outside of Vienna, the film is a mural of misery spread across a swelteringly hot summer weekend. From miserable divorcées to sexually depraved predators, crude hitchhikers, and underwear-clad misanthropes, Seidl labors to capture the seedy underside of human experience with his unblinking lens. Naturally there’s some skin on display here, but Seidl doesn’t do much to pretty it up. Gerti Lehner and Franziska Weiss are come-as-you-are in scenes that find them jiggling and boffing with grim enthusiasm.