“In a Better World”: Oscar-winning odyssey of Euro-guilt

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 21:02:00 +0000

I kept waiting for the admirable Danish director Susanne Bier's Oscar-winning film, "In a Better World," to move beyond ominous atmosphere, handsome production values and a hefty dose of northern European guilt. To my taste it never really does, and the connections Bier and screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen (also her collaborator on "Brothers" and "After the Wedding") try to draw between unrelated acts of cruelty in different parts of the world feel too schematic and intellectual. Still, there's an awful lot to look at in "In a Better World," whose spectacular widescreen images go from the North Sea coast of Denmark to the plains of East Africa, and Bier, as always, gets maximum results from her ensemble of first-rate Danish and Swedish actors.

“Brothers”: A wartime romance for our turbulent era

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 01:03:00 +0000

It's happening at last: Although neither the Iraq war nor certainly the war in Afghanistan has reached any sort of definitive end, we're starting to see movies -- from Hollywood and elsewhere -- that deal very specifically with the traumatic readjustment (or nonadjustment) of returning soldiers. Kimberly Peirce's "Stop-Loss," released last year, turned those difficulties into soap-opera material. Oren Moverman has recently given us a far more resonant picture, "The Messenger," which follows two war vets entrusted with the job of showing up on doorsteps to notify the next of kin (NOK for short) that their loved ones have been killed in the line of duty.

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“In a Better World”: Oscar-winning odyssey of Euro-guilt

“Brothers”: A wartime romance for our turbulent era