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 Danish movie, and I haven’t been doing great with subtitled films in recent years, 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% from critics and 90% from audiences 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. 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.
My recent apparent 2020 trend of alternating between Christian Bale, Denzel Washington, and Russell Crowe movies continues with my review of Mary Harron’s 2000 cult classic American Psycho. In his first lead role, this film introduced an experienced but still grossly undiscovered Bale (
Nisha Ganatra (The High Note) tries a tried-and-true formula with a slight twist in Late Night. The Emma Thompson (Howard’s End, Sense and Sensibility) dramedy focuses on her career as an acclaimed late-night talk show host who may be nearing the end of her career after plummeting ratings in recent months/years. Flanked by an all-white male writing staff, Katherine Newberry’s (Thompson) material has become predictably stale.
It’s hard to classify or compare Bong Joon Ho’s (Snowpiercer, Okja) Parasite to any other movie I’ve ever seen. From the first frame until the last, it comes together as a unique film that reminded me of