Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Rebellious young Axel Blackmar gets caught up into the family car business when his cousin, Paul, coaxes him to come to Arizona to attend the wedding of their Uncle Leo. As Axel makes the decision to try selling Cadillacs with his family, he meets an eccentric woman named Elaine and her equally quirky stepdaughter, Grace. Their lives become inextricably intertwined through romance, dreams – and death.
Arizona Dream is a singular, wildly imaginative film from Emir Kusturica that defies easy categorization. The cinematography by Vilko Filač is lush and dreamlike, capturing both the surreal fantasy sequences and the Arizona landscape with genuine visual poetry. The acting is exceptional — Johnny Depp, Jerry Lewis, Faye Dunaway, and Lili Taylor all deliver deeply committed, idiosyncratic performances that feel wholly inhabited. The novelty is very high: this is a one-of-a-kind collision of European surrealism with American mythology, with a voice utterly distinctive to Kusturica. The plot, while evocative and thematically rich, is deliberately elliptical and meandering, which can feel unfocused — it prioritizes mood and imagery over narrative drive. The ending is emotionally resonant but somewhat ambiguous and inconclusive in a way that may frustrate as much as it satisfies, holding it back from a top mark.