Loading ...Screen Daily - Bent Hamer’s unique blend of absurdist humour and aching melancholy has never worked better than in O’ Horten, an arthouse charmer which should duplicate a similar sales and distribution pattern to his last Norwegian film Kitchen Stories (2003) and win over a new legion of specialised fans.
Hamer, who scored a minor international ripple with his first English language venture Factotum in 2005, is nevertheless more comfortable working in his native Norwegian and employing his wonderfully deadpan sense of comedy which is somewhere between Aki Kaurismaki and Monty Python.
Central to O’Horten’s success is Bard Owe, a veteran Norwegian actor based in Copenhagen who has worked with everyone from Carl Theodor Dreyer to Lars Von Trier (most memorably as Dr Bondo in The Kingdom series). Owe plays Odd Horten, a 67 year-old train driver and engineer who has spent his life on the railways and is facing retirement.
His existence is one of comfortable old routines – he devotedly feeds the birds in his apartment, he owns a boat which he has always refused to sell, he regularly goes to see a lady friend Mrs Thogersen (Norby) on one of his train stop-offs. He visits his senile old mother, a former ski-jumper, in a retirement home, lamenting the fact that he was too afraid to jump himself in his youth… [Full Story]
GreenCine Daily - ”Nothing I’ve seen in Cannes has possessed and disturbed me quite as much as the Directors’ Fortnight entry Tony Manero, from young Chilean director Pablo Larraín,” writes Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir.
Cinematical - Some films are, for lack of a better word, glacial; they’re immense, dense, frozen and seemingly immobile. And a film like that can affect the viewer in one of two ways; either you bounce off the frozen surface of it, shut out and shunned — or you find the frozen surface to be a mirror, showing you things within your own reaction to it. With its naturalistic tone and bleak outlook, the new film from the Dardenne Brothers, Lorna’s Silence, is certain to provoke those kinds of polarized reactions. I found myself more in tune with the film and what it was reaching for, and was impressed by the familiar Dardenne methods and concerns and themes (which won their film L’Enfant the Palme d’Or in 2005 and Rosetta the same award in 1999) in Lorna’s Silence. At the same time, I can also understand the somewhat lukewarm reception for Lorna’s Silence; it’s only at Cannes that you hear people saying “Oh, not another hyper-realistic drama set in the gulfs and gaps between old and new Europe…”
GreenCine Daily - ”The searing intensity of To Take a Wife turns into overly diffused heat in Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s follow-up family drama The Seven Days,” writes Variety’s Jay Weissberg.
GreenCine Daily - ”Boldly grabbing hold of the central issue at the heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict - namely, whose land it is that is being contended by both sides - Salt of This Sea will certainly make people talk, even while it fails to fully involve them in its artificial drama,” writes Deborah Young in the Hollywood Reporter.
GreenCine Daily - ”Better Things unfolds in photographic compositions rather than dramatic scenes,” writes the Observer’s Jason Solomons.