You either like Hal Hartley's specific, offbeat, deadpan brand of filmmaking, or you don't; me, I tend to like it more than not, but "Surviving Desire" is really more like a bridge between his full-length projects. It's a slight yet amusing exercise in wordplay and verbal one-upmanship. There is not much more to say about it, because that's pretty much it: 4-5 people playing word games for 54 minutes. Some of the lines are quite insightful, like one about why Donovan chooses not to believe in anything. **1/2 out of 4.
Review of Surviving Desire
