Picking Up the Pieces

Picking Up the Pieces (2000) is Alfonso Arau's pitch-black comedy, and you can watch it online on iFILM. After catching his wife Candy in bed with another man, butcher Tex kills her in a rage and buries the pieces out in the desert.

Then the farce kicks in. Candy's severed hand surfaces in the sand, a blind old woman trips over it, and her sight comes flooding back. The town declares the hand a miracle — the Hand of the Virgin — and turns into a pilgrimage stop for the desperate and the ailing. Crowds pray, the mayor counts the cash, and Tex scrambles to steal back the evidence before the sheriff connects it to him. Woody Allen plays the flustered killer, Sharon Stone the murdered wife.

Arau crams the frame with names: David Schwimmer, Kiefer Sutherland, Cheech Marin, Fran Drescher, Lou Diamond Phillips, a very young Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The humor is sacrilegious and deliberately absurd, not for everyone, but fans of dark satire about faith, greed and small-town hysteria will laugh out loud. Stream Picking Up the Pieces (2000) online on iFILM.