The Bloody Child

An experimental meditation on the violence that poisons relationships between men and woman, this nonlinear collage of images is not for every moviegoer. Sibling filmmakers Nina and Tinka Menkes aren't interested in narrative, except as it's evoked through fragments of action: guys flirting with girls in a C&W bar; a young man sitting in the back of a car on a desolate stretch of desert highway; an unidentified woman (Tinka Menkes, who assumes multiple guises throughout the film) against a variety of seductive North African landscapes, sometimes naked, sometimes clothed in bright, saturated colors; a cluster of marines talking, ominous phrases like "blood all over,...