You don't have to agree with its premise -- that middle-class marriage equals sadomasochism -- to respond to the bravura comic glee with which the director lays it out.

A horrific black comedy -- a devastating view of bourgeois marriage rendered in a delirious baroque style.

Easily the most twisted film of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's career, Martha (a favorite of his frequent cinematographer Michael Ballhaus) catalogs the tyrannical hold a bourgeois husband has over his wife.

An array of domestic terrors