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 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 film 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 film (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 those movies will be bad. Like everyone, I have a job and many other hobbies, and time is limited. However, when a foreign language film does break through, and it is well made, it is a film that I will likely remember for a long time, if not for the rest of my life. This was certainly the case with The Lunchbox, North Face, and The Hunt.
Congratulations to all those associated with what will be the biggest surprise moneymaking movie of 2016. Jaume Collet-Serra’s (
Suppose you watched season 1 of HBO’s True Detective, and you were as much of a fan of the six-minute single-shot shootout scene that ended episode four (titled Who Goes There) as I was. You might like John Hillcoat’s (
“Nice Guys Finish Last.” That’s a saying we’ve all heard before. The grunge band Green Day wrote an iconic song about it in the mid-1990s. I’ll alter the quote slightly by saying that The Nice Guys finishes last. This was not my favorite movie. I knew I would probably feel this way going into the film, but I was willing to sacrifice the two hours because it starred two of my favorite actors, Ryan Gosling (
A Walk in the Woods, the 2015 comedy-drama that I thought would be a throwaway movie I originally only watched so that I could add it to my list, turned out to be one of the year’s biggest surprises. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’d be a fool to think that a year from now, I’d remember anything from this movie or that I’ll ever watch this movie again. But for two hours on a Tuesday night in the middle of April, it was a refreshing escape from reality, and the movie had me grinning from ear to ear from the first scene until the last. Also, if Robert Redford (The Horse Whisperer,