An honorable and often enticing piece of personal filmmaking.

Gets its teeth in you and shakes. Once it’s over, you find yourself replaying it on an endless loop in your head.

It's hard to deny that Gallo has caught the freedom and melancholy, the intoxicating aimlessness, the lonely twilight beauty of a solo road trip in a way that no previous filmmaker quite has.

Make no mistake: The Cannes version was a bad film, but now Gallo's editing has set free the good film inside. The Brown Bunny is still not a complete success -- it is odd and off-putting when it doesn't want to be -- but as a study of loneliness and need, it evokes a tender sadness.

The Brown Bunny is certainly about how vain Gallo is. Yet rarely has narcissism produced such a handsome work of cinema.

An idiosyncratic document of sexual obsession and guilt, it alienates as easily as it mesmerizes.

In brief, The Brown Bunny, however antagonistic and borderline tedious, is an art work of sorts, and Gallo himself, though an egomaniac of staggering solemnity-a priest of art longing for a cult-is not a fake.

If the independent film world were littered with alleged disasters like The Brown Bunny, the scene would be far richer for it.

An astonishing improvement on the original version. With 27 minutes excised, pic emerges from its mind-numbing undergrowth as a memorable -- if still highly specialized -- exercise in personal, '70s-style American filmmaking, with a cohesive feel and rhythm that marks Gallo as a distinctive indie talent.

It's genuinely elemental, embarrassingly sincere. You can't accuse Gallo of pandering to anyone but himself. Not just a one-man band, he is his own entourage -- and likely to remain so. And that anguished solipsism seems to be, at least in part, the movie's subject.

In "Buffalo 66," Gallo was an unfunny prankster. In The Brown Bunny, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he's a real filmmaker.

Yes, the film jumps up and down on a high wire over the chasm separating Pretension and Art. But that's also a form of courage.

The film stubbornly refuses to fill empty space with dialogue or adhere to any structure other than its own downbeat atmosphere, forcing viewers to be intensely patient or squirm. It's the best film I’ve seen in a while that I wouldn't recommend to anyone.

Quite possibly the biggest ego trip ever to play Cannes, or anywhere else, at any time.