focus on films from Denmark

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101 Reykjavik Baltasar Kormakur's 101 REYKJAVIK is a crowd-pleasing comedy that gleefully takes the concept of "family dysfunction" to an outrageous new level. Hlynur (Hilmer Snaer Gudnason), an unmotivated Icelander with no interests other than watching porn and getting drunk, still lives at home with his sympathetic mother. He has a brief fling with…    more      Babette's Feast This Academy Award-winner for Best Foreign Language Film was a big art house hit, spawning a whole international subgenre, "foodie" (films about the liberating effects of good food). It's adapted from a story by Isak Dinesen about two sisters in a 19th century Calvinist settlement in Denmark who, under their late father's rigorous spiritual…    more      Carl Theodor Dreyer - Day of Wrath/Ordet/Gertrud DAY OF WRATH: Dreyer's horrifying masterpiece based on Hans Wiers Jenssen's play which, in turn, was based on actual records of witch trials during the 1600s. An old woman curses the local clergyman and his family as she is burned at the stake in this sobering and ghastly study of religious fanaticism. ORDET: Based on the play by Kaj…    more      Dear Wendy Dogme '95 cofounders Thomas Vinterberg (CELEBRATION) and Lars Von Trier (DANCER IN THE DARK, DOGVILLE) team up in DEAR WENDY, an unusual but entertaining drama set in an unnamed American small town. Jamie Bell, the award-winning actor who played the title role in BILLY ELLIOT, stars as Dick, a teenager loner whose father (Trevor Cooper)…    more      Gitmo: The New Rules of War Jolting and impossible to ignore, this provocative and intelligent exposé cuts through the official lies and cover-ups to find out what really goes on at America's central gulag in the war on terror, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. GITMO: THE NEW RULES OF WAR is fueled by a jarring, globetrotting investigative fury that lends an ear to a fascinating…    more      Hamsun A compelling dramatization of the last years of Norwegian Nobel Laureate Knut Hamsun's life, when he and his actress wife shocked the world by publicly supporting the Third Reich and openly advocating the Nazi occupation of Norway. But the Hamsuns' controversial politics are strongly rooted in their unconventional and tumultuous family…    more