A fair-haired Danish do-gooder at an insolvent Bombay orphanage is summoned against his will to his native Copenhagen on a hat-in-hand fundraising mission, and upon arrival is summoned additionally to the wedding of Mr. Moneybags's daughter. To our surprise (and who else's?), Mrs. Moneybags turns out to be an old …
Isabel (Michelle Williams), the manager of an Indian orphanage, travels to New York to pick up a generous endowment check. She soon learns that the daughter she thought was put up for adoption at birth by her ex Oscar (Billy Crudup) is alive and well and living with her father …
Jim Sheridan’s Hollywood do-over of Susanne Bier’s Danish original is a wartime soap opera served up as kitchen-sink realism, photographed by Frederick Elmes with a clear and cold albeit clichéd eye for Middle American mundanity. The Good Brother (Tobey Maguire) is off to war in Afghanistan, currently the Good War, …
A bully afflicts a boy, and a tougher kid full of congested fury comes to his aid. That’s the plot core, but Susanne Bier’s Danish movie is much richer than a PC tract about bullying. It shifts from Africa to Denmark and back, and the kids are as complex as …
A Danish cancer patient (Trine Dyrholm) catches her husband diddling a co-worker two days before they’re set to leave for their daughter’s Italian wedding. In the eyes of the audience, that frees her up to undertake an affair with her kid’s future father-in-law (Pierce Brosnan). A supposedly heartwarming comedy that …
Director Susanne Bier (Serena) decides to do Raising Arizona as a straight drama. Meaning, a cop finds a couple with a baby who is more than they can handle, and decides the child would be better off with him and his wife. Starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. In Danish and Swedish with …
The loss of a spouse (post-fire), measured in a nonlinear narrative that eclipses our feelings of sorrow with feelings of mere irritation. Once the widow reaches out to her husband's heroin-addicted best friend, the narrative straightens out, but the striven-for naturalness never rings true. With Halle Berry, Benicio Del Toro, …