An Icelandic coming of age film set in a remote fjord where the relatively few families all know each other and there is no hiding away.
Thor and Kristian are 13 and best friends,
and in the village, everyone is starting to experiment with girls.
Thor is embarrassed because he still hasn’t developed fully. He also has a difficult home life. Divorced and ineffective mother,
absent father and two stroppy sisters, especially Rakel, the older one.
Kristian has a tense home too with a stern mother and a hot-headed father.
Much of the film shows us village life in this quiet but extremely beautiful place and the comings and goings of the kids as they circle around daring to take adult steps or not. It is very sensitively done. And the friendship between the two boys becomes more intense over the period especially as one starts to realise he is gay and falling for his friend, which will in turn lead to some dramatic moments.
A tad overlong but highly satisfying for its honesty and the convincing acting throughout, this first film by Gudmundur Arnar Gudmunsson is another welcome addition to the solid Icelandic film legacy in recent years.
♦♦♦♦+
in the north of Portugal to spot a special breed of stork. When the rapids get his canoe, capsizing the boat and leaving him almost for dead, he begins a series of encounters that transforms him and shows him different aspects of his personality. He is helped initially by two lost Chinese backpackers
who then turn on him
, he comes across weird tribal ceremonies
, he meets a young shepherd (Xelo Cagiao) with whom he has pleasant
and unpleasant moments and he is hunted down by a trio of topless valkyries.
The forest is the unconscious and there are countless symbols
both religious and pagan throughout the film. Towards the end, the main actor (Paul Hamy)
is even replaced in some scenes by the director. Some will call it pretentious and unbearable but I think there is enough action and richness of vision to make it a decent film.
And it will linger in the mind for quite some time.
lecture halls that reverberate to noisy protests and students running from class to the library to study group. All very stressful.
: Antoine, an intense boy who is on his third attempt to get in and literally makes himself ill in the process and Benjamin who is from a family of doctors and is taking it all a little less seriously. He studies but not as much as Antoine
and yet gets higher grades much to the other’s frustration.
the film gives a good account of the pressure young medical students are under
and is a thoughtful work. But it is not a great dramatic work either, simply something for a wet afternoon.
to celebrate the 50thbirthday of one of their group and the three days promise to be a mixture of partying and secrets being revealed.
and co-written by two of the other protagonists
is supposed to be a sort of X-ray of 50 something women reaching a key moment in their lives: one has just lost her job, another is recovering from surgery, another wants to make a key career move, another wonders about her marriage to a perfect boor and so on.
and Maya Rudolph
whose character I liked best did what they could with the script but I quite frequently asked myself what the point of certain things were (which included most of Jason Schwatrzmann’s character’s appearances).
There is also a really unnecessary scene where they bitch at a bunch of millennials at an art gallery. Some of the denouement was just all too tidy and incredible.
and then singing a tribute song to her classmates written by her sister. Fame came to her at 13 and she has been both at the top, a sort of Taylor Swift of her time and at the bottom, drugs, accidents, etc. The first half, which is more interesting portrays her rise and the second half her current situation with Portman being a stroppy cow in full flow.
Albertine, product of a short underage romance. And the sister (Stacy Martin) is always present as a Cinderella figure
along with Jude Law
as her manager (underused) and Kathryn Erbe as the publicist (channeling Streep).
but it is also true to say that it has its uneven stretches. Ostensibly a burgeoning love story between two teenagers
on a Southern Japanese island
, the film starts with a bit of a murder mystery, a drowned body connected to one of their mothers. From there we cover separations (Kaito’s parents are separated and he goes to visit his dad back in Tokyo for a bit of male guidance), death (Kyoko’s mother is dying)
, shamanism (the mother is also a shaman as it seems are half the elderly people on the island)
, local folk music and nature. Nature’s inexorable power over man is a big theme here and the islanders seem to get that better than the city dwellers.
Kawase gives us plenty of pauses in the narration to simply admire waves
, typhoons, banyan trees, mangroves and the kids cycling in the breeze.
Strangely enough we also get two rather unpleasant and unnecessary scenes of bleeding goats to death.
the photography and music are great but the symbolism veers between very obvious (the sea as emotions which Kaito
is afraid of as he is getting in touch with his own feelings) and the plain obscure.
But when she is given a jigsaw puzzle for her birthday and discovers that she can do it in double quick time, she gets bitten by a bug that sees her volunteer to become the partner
of another jigsaw puzzler in a national competition. This man, Roberto (Irfan Khan)
a somewhat demotivated patent designer whose wife has walked out on him quickly becomes an important person in Agnes’s life as she starts to dream of possible futures for herself and her family that had remained hidden.
The work of Scottish actress Kelly McDonald is excellent here and often with a mere look she conveys all the inner shifting and uncertainties that are taking place. 
Quite magical in this aspect and in showing us how small events can change our lives.
He has skipped away from his detox programme and the big worry is that he will continue to take drugs for the night she allows him to stay home. The first part of the movie focuses on the tension involved here and with the rest of the family. Younger sister (Kathryn Newton,
a Saoirse Ronan lookalike) is not best pleased and then there is stoic second husband (Courtenay Vance) 
and the two younger kids who don’t quite get all that is going on. In the second half, Ben’s past
comes back to haunt him and he is being threatened to pay back old debts. To resolve this he and his mother end up on a snowy night’s odyssey trying to resolve old wrongs and mother gets to see many things that he son rightly says she does not really want to know about.
, son of the film’s director Peter is very good in the lead role and has great chemistry with Roberts.
Some say this is Julia’s best performance. I don’t think so but it is work that she can be well proud of and her handling of the conflicting feelings of a mother in this situation is excellent. Worth seeing for the performances. Could do without any more films on this topic for a while.
majestically leads a competent cast as prima donna actress Irina Arkadina and does so with her customary style.
Brian Dennehy gives good support as her brother. Corey Stoll is new to me as her lover, the playwright Boris Trigonin. Billy Howle
plays jealous son Konstantin and Saoirse Ronan, his girlfriend Nina.
Elizabeth Moss adds character as the depressive Masha.
All well and good and the whole staging is carefully and attractively conveyed on film but there is little passion or life in it all.
Certainly no Russian angst. So, see it for Bening and for a clear version of the play and the points Chekhov wanted to make.
Other than that it is somewhat lackluster.
set by the Germans and it occurred to the Danish that German prisoners-of-war should do the job. This was in breach of the Geneva convention and moreover, the prisoners chosen tended to be very young or old. The first part of the film portrays the nerve-wracking work,
the suspense of which is maintained throughout the film.
It also shows the hatred of the Danes towards their invaders personified in the treatment the Sergeant Rasmussen inflicts on the boys: violence, starvation, slavery and ridicule.
A salutary lesson here about the need to forgive rather than seek vengeance. As the movie continues we see that Rasmussen is starting to see the human side of his charges
and attempts to cut them some slack even though army hierarchy is relentless in their anti-German stance. The mining of the beaches was a crime but what followed the war was also extremely cruel and indefensible.
So, the film gives you plenty to think about cruelty and humans and there are several very harsh scenes, sensitively filmed in the most part
but hard to swallow all the same. Roland Moller is a very good Rasmussen aided by the leader among the young Germans played by Louis Hoffmann.
Photography by Camilla Hjelm is bleakly beautiful.
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