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Award-winning Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki rounds out his minimalist “loser trilogy”–including Drifting Clouds and The Man Without a Past–with this “radiantly beautiful” (Film Comment) noir melodrama about a lonely security guard (Janne Hyytiainen) in Helsinki who is dragged into the shady business of a Russian femme fatale (Maria Jarvenhelmi). Timo Salminen’s evocative cinematography is fittingly […] |
SCANDINAVIAN CINEMA
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Notorious director Lars von Trier (Dogville, Breaking the Waves) dons the devil’s mask and puts one of his idols, Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth, to the test in this ingenious pseudo-documentary. Calling himself the Obstructor, von Trier challenges Leth to remake his 1967 short, The Perfect Human, five times and sets bizarre, arbitrary constraints to limit […] |
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“No ordinary black-and-white Finnish flick with 17 characters named Frank, this ultra-hip absurdist comedy brought Kaurismaki’s trademark blend of deadpan humor, idiosyncratic irony, mannered minimalism and compelling humanism to the fore. Showcasing a fondness for wry road movies, and his love of disaffected, down-and-out characters, Calamari Union sets its posse of Franks (and one dude […] |
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Icelandic director Dagur Kari made a splash with his defiantly oddball debut, Noi Albino. He follows it up with another off-the-wall effort, a Danish-set slacker comedy filmed in a jittery black and white lifted wholesale from the French new wave style book. |
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Inspired by Dostoyevsky’s famous novel, this engrossing Finnish version of Crime and Punishment revolves around an ex-law student in Helsinki (Markku Toikka) who now works in a slaughterhouse. One day the worker searches out the drunk driver that had killed his fiancee and coldly shoots him to death. The worker does not get away without […] |
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Comedy is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the dogmatic Dane Lars von Trier, but that’s the most economical way to describe The Boss of It All. Instead of harping on America, the director focuses his cynicism on his homeland. Ravn (Peter Gantzler), the owner of an IT firm […] |
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Drifting Clouds is the story of head-waitress Ilona (Kati Outinen) and his husband Lauri (Kari Väänänen), a street car driver. Both of them become unexpectedly unemployed and have to rebuild their lives and social self-esteem. The unyielding couple decide to start a restaurant with their friends, and after a series of events, manage to […] |
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After taking top prizes at Cannes and the Chicago International Film Festival with Reconstruction in 2003, Danish writer-director Christoffer Boe returned with what can best be described as a very severe, very dark reworking of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with a little metaphysical support from Tarkovsky. A dour pianist (Ulrich Thomsen, The Celebration) […] |