The abundance of great extras on this release of The Celebration may violate the Dogme 95 “Vow of Chastity,” but it’s a fitting tribute.
Despite the sordid, festering material that the series explores, what ultimately emerges is sheer beauty.
The Thomas Vinterberg film’s sentimentality is suspect, laced with an intriguing but vague strain of bitterness.
The film is a provocative WWII screed that almost deliberately goes out of its way to avoid sentimentality or bathos of any sort.
The slightly dour tone is the perfect backdrop for the director to skillfully weave together his varied narrative strands in a surprisingly entertaining medley.
It aims to capitalize on the minor triumph of Strike Back by delivering a sparingly entertaining ex-con-impersonates-a-sheriff revenge tale.
The ensemble here is mostly padded out with anonymous Norwegians acting as disposable creature fodder.
Without its patronizing third-world sequences, In a Better World would have only been a somber, self-serious film about the ethics of violence.
It resolves its thicket of mature moral questions in the most glib and banal means possible.
When it comes to Nicolas Cage performances these days, goofier is infinitely better.
The latest from the Dogma cine-factory is notable for director Kristian Levring’s visual suggestion of madness.
Even completists of director Tom Tykwer will write this shoddy film off like so much bad debt.
Though based on a popular video-game series, Xavier Gens’s Hitman plays like a music video without the music.
Adam’s Apples is both too flippant to be moving as a spiritual allegory and too clumsy and unfunny to succeed as a deadpan comedy.
Susanne Bier’s follow-up to Open Hearts is wonderfully acted but predictably plotted by Anders Thomas Jensen.
The film is the equivalent of watching a man walk into quicksand knowing perfectly well that he will sink to his death.
So this is what a rhetorical question looks like on the big screen.
The Weight of Water comes to resemble the kind of softcore twaddle you’d expect to see on Showtime’s Red Shoe Diaries.