young 12 year old boy masturbates in a piece of raw meat.....young nude girl bites an old mans toenails....young boys use a cat for sex.....mother falls in a tomato truck and gets pregnant by tomato....dad and mom watch son evacuate his bowels and clap when he does it. IS THAT ENUFF FOR YOU. and some say i didn't understand the film and it is a masterpiece. sorry but this movie is rotten to the core. and im french..and i don't betray my people because the movie C.R.A.Z.Y was a million times better. leolo is an absolute disaster. 1 point for cinematography though...and thats it. THOSE who loved it well.......good for you but you ain't no friend of mine

One thing I'll say about Leolo is that you definitely won't forget it. Thankfully, though, and quite necessarily, I'm not limited to that single sentence. Love it or hate it, this is an experience that will stick with you, and which over time will most likely come up on the positive side of your filmgoing experiences. The film's protagonist, Leolo Lauzon, is a young French Canadian boy who claims to be a son of Italy, a notion he accredits to a miraculous encounter between his mother and a tomato grown in Italy. He is the youngest in his family, and at that stage in his life, he is also the most sane. In his spare time, he escapes the daily dysfunction of growing up by writing eloquently on scraps of paper, which he then discards, and which are then read by a local homeless man: the texts serve as the film's narration. Though essentially a story about growing up, this is a film that can be read from many angles, and whose thematic depths span everywhere between the themes of family, fear, hate, lust, and love. Yet, in spite of its broadness, the film manages to be simultaneously and paradoxically intimate, epic, far-fetched, and spot-on.I watched this movie under the pretext that it was either THE best, or at least ONE of the best Canadian films ever made, and so my expectations were quite high. The other film that holds claim to this distinction is called "Mon Oncle Antoine," directed by Claude Jutra, and which I highly recommend. That film is the type you can watch and reflect on with an immediate love that will never wane over the passage of time. Leolo, on the other hand, is like a scape on the knee: at first it's painful and unpleasant, but soon it builds and forms into a scab that you find satisfying to pick. Excuse the obscurity of that analogy, but if you watch the film I think you'll find that it applies quite nicely.Some might find Leolo alienating, others revolting, and some just plane weird. Personally, I recommend that you turn off your internal "parental discretion" metre, and just watch this film for what it is, which at times is the most visceral, human, and beautifully shot films you are likely to witness. In terms of cinematic indulgence, it might have a few equals, but there are none that do it better. Initially, I rated this movie a 4/10, feeling as though it was terribly overrated, but you know what? It grew on me. I find that on a fairly regular basis, this movie and particular scenes enter my mind, and they do so for all the right reasons. I find this odd, as many of the movies I claim to love do not do this very same thing, which I think says a lot about the substance and strength of this film. It tells me that the moments that might be considered exploitive or overly-explicit, and maybe even illegal, are there for more than mere shock. In closing, I simply have to implore you to watch this film, and though you may rue the experience the first time, take my word for it that you won't regret it, though that might take a few weeks.

Movies like this make me want to punch Roger Ebert. I think it was Ebert who praised this. Maybe it was the other one. Hell, I'll punch em both.Don't let the pseudo intellectual reviews fool you. This is "American Pie 2" masquerading as an art house film. Potty humour. A man masturbates on a load of tomatoes. A boy urinates off a balcony. A fat woman takes a dump (while the camera moves slowly in between her legs). A boy tries to take a dump but fails. A boy takes a dump (with sound effects).This is all in the first 20 minutes. I shut the movie off, saving myself the torment of watching what someone told me was in the 2nd half: more masturbation, sex with animals, more people taking dumps, sex with 12-year-old-boys, and probably a few farts for good measure.American Pie 2.I'm sorry to say that this is the first Canadian movie I've seen that royally bit the big one. It'll take me a while to recover from this atrocity. Save yourself the upchucked lunch and watch a good, wholesome Kurosawa movie instead.P.S. If you're a fan of Peter Greenaway, you'll love this movie. Seriously.

This is one of the few movies that left me mystified. Was it trying to create only mood (however unpleasant), was it trying to convey a deep message (however obscure), was it trying to show that there is squalor in modern Montreal (however unsurprising)? All of these? None of these? Why was this movie made?A boy is coming of age in a totally dysfunctional family. The parents are obsessed with bodily functions - the father checks the boy's output after each visit to the toilet; all five children are forced to take laxatives. If you see dark humor in this, then you may like this movie. I'm afraid the humor flew over my head.We see rats in the sink, rats in the bathtub. In one scene, that I assume is to have some special meaning, we see at some length a filthy turkey in the bathtub. What's the meaning of that? And what an inspiring thing it is to see a young boy having sex with a cat.I felt like taking a shower after watching this movie. The boy, Léolo, finds his family so difficult to deal with that he escapes into dreams, fantasy, and writing. Maybe understandably, most everyone in this family winds up going nuts or heading toward death. The music is a grab bag. There is a mixture of things like Tom Waits' "Cold Cold Ground," Tallis' "Spem in Allum," the Stones' "You can't always get what you want," and chanting.Much of the movie is told in a voice-over and sections of the novel "L'avalée des avallés" by the Canadian Réjean DuCharme are read - this is a book that Léolo is reading and it is the only book in his house. A recurring quote is, "Because I dream, I'm not." I think the idea behind that is that we dream to escape reality, but your guess is as good as mine.I have to give this movie credit for coming out of nowhere to give us something like we have never seen before, but that doesn't mean that we will like it. Sometimes there is a fine balance between art and pretension and, for me, this movie weighs in on the pretension side.