Thomas Vinterberg (The Hunt, The Command) turned heads when he received his first Best Director Academy Award nomination for the little-known but well-received Another Round, the 2020 Best International Feature Film winner. There were some excellent candidates for Best Director in 2015, but Vinterberg wasn’t necessarily in that discussion.
I had this movie at the top of my queue to watch for more than six months before I finally watched it on a recent plane ride. It’s a Denmark movie, and I haven’t been doing great in recent years with subtitled films, especially when watching at home. A long plane ride was the perfect opportunity to focus on my laptop with some headphones on. The movie earned 92% critics and 90% audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes. Those scores were both pretty high. Another Round, while original, was nothing special. It wasn’t so much that it was uninteresting. It just wasn’t memorable at all. It also had numerous things that could have been improved, including plenty of continuity questions. I don’t doubt that there were many international films from 2020 and that this one received much of its acclaim and fanfare because of its director and lead actor.
Continue reading Another Round (2020) →
Mads Mikkelsen is most notably known as a villain. Whether you recognize him more as the man opposing James Bond in Casino Royale or as Hannibal Lecter on NBC’s hit show Lecter, he’s very adept at playing the bad guy. But, in the most poignant performance of his career and one that earned him praise across the globe, Mikkelsen stars as Lucas, a kind and gentle daycare employee falsely accused of molesting one of his students in the Danish film and Academy Award-nominated foreign language film The Hunt. I struggle with movies that are subtitled. My philosophy often is if I can view a good movie in English or one that is in another language that will force me to spend a couple of hours reading while also trying to pay attention to the visuals on the screen, why wouldn’t I pick the movie in my native language? Unless a movie (or one of its leads) is nominated for an Academy Award (Amour, Maria Full of Grace), is recommended by a friend (The Lunchbox), or doesn’t have an English substitute (North Face), I’m probably not going to give it a chance. It’s not because I think that those movies will be bad. Like everyone, I have a job and many other hobbies, and, frankly, time is limited. However, when a foreign language film does breakthrough, and it is one that I think is well made, it is a film that I am likely to remember for a long, long time, if not for the rest of my life. This was certainly the case with The Lunchbox and North Face and is also the case with The Hunt.
Continue reading The Hunt (2013) →
Movies I Watch That Inspire Me to Critique!