MOVIE REVIEW
The Ape (2009)
The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival
"The Ape" is an unsettling and uncomfortable picture; it's raw, emotive, unforgiving and brutal. It's a trying and difficult piece of work that makes no concessions to its audience and proffers no apologies for neglecting to do so. Writer-director Jesper Ganslandt thrusts his audience into the rapidly unraveling world of Krister (an anxious Olle Sarri) who awakes on a bathroom floor covered in blood. What thus transpires is a visceral insight into Krister's fragmented psyche as he seemingly tries to recall — or indeed forget — what has gone before.
Continue reading “Hell on Wheels” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Knut Koivisto/Music Box Films
An epic-length murder mystery that takes in sexual abuse, serial killing, Nazism and incest does not sound like a barrel of laughs, and "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is indeed no picnic. Based on the famous bestseller by Stieg Larsson, it's a locked-room detective story worthy of Agatha Christie, transplanted to the chilly Swedish countryside and goosed into life by one singular and incendiary character.
Continue reading “Hate in a Cold Climate” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Patrik, Age 1.5 (2008)
Per-Anders Jörgensen/Regent Releasing
Sometimes movies should show new things that hadn’t been seen or considered before. Sometimes they delve into human emotions in fresh ways. Sometimes it’s pretty people blowing things up, or just the oldest sins in the newest ways. "Patrik, Age 1.5" tells us an old story, but one that’s still the best: that even though life is messy and complicated and imperfect, it’s still possible to be happy. It’s been a long time since a movie has so perfectly achieved this uplifting affect. And if you’d told me a gay Swedish adoption comedy with a country-music soundtrack would have achieved this, I would have laughed in disbelief.
Continue reading “Two Men and a Big Baby” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Everlasting Moments (2008)
Nille Leander/IFC Films
Sweden apparently hasn’t always been the expedient society in which particleboard furniture and fast fashion are ubiquitous. It’s unfathomable that a century ago – before widespread electricity and the enlightenment by such luminaries as Ingmar Bergman and ABBA – the country was a white-trash wasteland inhabited by deadbeat, wife-beating drunkards who treated their impoverished households as baby farms and kept themselves busy during workers’ strikes by planting bombs and shacking up with mistresses. At the very least this was the case for Sigfrid (Mikael Persbrandt), the greasy, mustachioed husband of protagonist Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen) in Jan Troell’s Bergmanesque “Everlasting Moments.”
Continue reading “Restoring a Tarnished Life” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Let the Right One In (2008)
Magnet Releasing
Leave it to the Swedes to revive the now predictable conventions of the vampire genre with their unique brand of existential depth and stark aestheticism. To say that “Let the Right One In” is a modern horror classic may be true but understates the magnitude of its success as an unflinching take on the sometimes harrowing rites of passage of adolescence and a touching tale of first love.
Continue reading “My Blood-Thirsty Valentine” »
