Flame & Citron (2008) Dir. Ole Christian Madsen, Denmark.

Scandinavian films are no longer simply the realm of art house theaters and film festivals. Recent years have  produced relative blockbusters of action-packed movies that appeal to wider audiences. Swedish film adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s  Millennium series and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let The Right One In garnered critical and popular praise as well as English-language adaptations. The Norwegian horror film Dead Snow has joined the ranks of classic zombie flicks with its “entertaining mix of camp, scares, and blood and guts” (Rotten Tomatoes).

Flame & Citron’s represents a recent big screen success from Norway’s Ole Christian Madsen. Set in Nazi-occupied Denmark, the film follows resistance fighters in their attempts to assassinate both Nazi officers and Danish collaborators. The title refers to the nicknames of the movie’s protagonists, the red-haired Flame and Citron, saboteur of Copenhagen-built Citroën cars and trucks built for the Germans.

Flame & Citron is an action-packed film that buzzes with treachery, deceit, gunfire and suspense. While the main characters are based on real-life resistance fighters, director Madsen doesn’t let history weigh down the forward-moving drive of the film, instead keeping his well-trained eye on the compelling details of Flame and Citron’s efforts. The fast pace, however, does leave room for the audience to question the rightness of Flame & Citron’s actions. Are they, as Washington Post film critic Michael O’Sullivan writes, resistance fighters or merely criminals?

Watch the trailer on YouTube.

Dogtooth (2009) Dir. Giorgos Lanthimos, Greece

Add Dogtooth to your list of recently released films that straddle an uncomfortable line between comedy and something else (see Four Lions).The title refers to the lie the father of this film tells his children: they can only leave home when they are adults, and no one is an adult until one  looses his or her dogtooth.

Until that mysterious and fateful day, these young adult children are kept isolated from the world outside, told even more curious and fantastical stories (cats are the most dangerous creatures in the world, zombies are small yellow flowers, they have a second brother who lives on the other side of the wall). Director Giorgos Lanthimos ensures that things just keep getting stranger in this family until ultimately, it seems they have gotten as strange, intolerable and terrible as they can possibly get. Then, Lanthimos cranks up the strange to 11.

Winner of the Cannes Film Festival Prix Un Certain Regard and nominated for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Dogtooth caught the attention of critics and filmgoers alike with its unsettling mix of humor and horror, perverse satire and disturbing situations. Perhaps Roger Ebert sums the film up best when he writes “Dogtooth is like a car crash. You cannot look away.”

Is it hilarious? Sadistic? Shocking? Brilliant? If you take this trip with Lanthimos and his talented cast, you’re certain to have a strong opinion of your own.

Watch the trailer on YouTube.

Ricky (2009) Dir. François Ozon, France.

Both the trailer and movie site descriptions of François Ozon’s (Swimming Pool, Under the Sand) latest film are vague on the subject of what Ricky is about. The plot, ostensibly, follows a fairly standard love story premise: a woman meets a man and they have a baby. Yet there’s something in the baby’s face that suggests this tot might present more problems than the average newborn.

Is this a horror movie? Is Ricky the French Bad Seed? The truth about Ricky is much more gentle than that, but poses no fewer problems for his struggling parents.

Ozon’s film is based on the short story “Moth” by English author Rose Tremain, the title of which could give you a clue about what spurns this film to move, as Roger Ebert writes, from the “gritty realism” which provides the initial setting of the film to the “pure fantasy” where it finds its conclusion. Another clue comes from IMDb’s “Crazy Credits” feature:

“No animals or flying babies were harmed in the making of this film.”

Watch the trailer on YouTube.

Four Lions (2010). Dir. Chris Morris, Great Britain.

At first blush, it may be difficult to reconcile the two phrases “Jihadi suicide bombers” and “slapstick comedy”, yet director Chris Morris does more than reconcile the two, he marries them perfectly and wraps them up nicely in his well-received but under-viewed farce, Four Lions.

Naturally, pre-release skepticism surrounded satirist Morris’ first full-length feature film. Entertainment writers and news journalists alike asked if some topics were, perhaps, too taboo, too serious, to make light of in black comedy. Others cried Islamaphobia. But when Four Lions premiered at Sundance last year, it became clear that the director had done his homework.

The Daily Express gave the film a 4 out 5 and concluded the review with something of a warning combined with an entreaty:

“There are truly shocking, uncomfortable moments among the hilarity. You may have qualms and reservations about Four Lions but it will make you laugh and it might even make you shed a tear. It is comedy without a safety net. A comedy of terrors.”

Not convinced? Decide for yourself when you allow Morris and his cast of comedic actors take you on this trip.

Watch the trailer on YouTube.

Biutiful (2010). Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Spain.

Recipient of Academy Award nominations for Best Actor (Javier Bardem) and Best Foreign Language Film, Biutiful is the story of a single father in Barcelona struggling to keep his family safe as his life, lived outside the law, closes in on him.

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu is best known for his critically-praised 2006 film Babel. Biutiful, only his fourth feature film, represents a return to González Iñárritu’s native Spanish-language, this time, in Barcelona, Spain.  Critics compared Biutiful to a poem and were moved by what The Guardian called the directors “cinematic language”.

Spanish actor Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men, 2007) impressed critics and audiences alike with his performance as Uxbal, the petty criminal at the heart of the film. In addition to his Oscar nod, Bardem received the Best Actor award at Cannes. Roger Ebert, who gave the film 3 stars, wrote that “What drew me into the film and engaged my sympathy was the presence of Bardem himself. . . a vastly human actor”.

Biutiful will certainly take you to place you are unlikely to ever visit outside of film; and with Bardem in front of the camera and González Iñárritu behind it, this will be a journey to be remembered.

Watch the trailer on YouTube.

Unless you’re planning a study abroad experience for the semester, you probably don’t have any international travel plans for the next few weeks.

Don’t let your homebodiness get you down– experience the world through the Library’s international film collection. We have feature films from 81 countries and every one of them is available for rental– just $1 for a week in a faraway place. You can’t beat that kind of vacation.

Pack your bags with DVDs and get ready to travel as Movie Monday shares highlights from our great international film collection– a new movie every Monday until we move on to the next theme!

In the runner-up position for top cinematic villain of all film history is Norman Bates, the murderous motel manager of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic, Psycho.

Most movie-goers had never seen a movie like Psycho before or encountered a villain like Bates on the big screen and they flocked to cinemas to see it. Although some draw could certainly be attributed to the racy appearance of Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane, it’s most certainly Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates who carries the film.

Norman Bates was a novelty in 1960– he was the centerpiece of what has been called the first “gore film” as well as the first “psychoanalytical thriller”.  In a New York Times review, Bosley Crowther described our killer as “a queer duck, given to smirks and giggles”. Yet, as Roger Ebert writes, even as Perkins “shows us there is something fundamentally wrong with Norman, . . . he has a young man’s likability” and “he evokes our sympathy”.

This complexity of character, the undermining of the viewer’s assumptions, the evocations of almost unwilling affinity for a killer (and one who is based Ed Gein, a real life killer who garners little public sympathy), the hinted-at history which begs for more explication– all of these aspects combine into a figure with the cultural impact and long lasting legacy worthy of the number 2 spot on AFI’s top villains list.

According to AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Heroes & Villains, the absolute pinnacle of cinematic evil is Hannibal Lecter, prime villain of Silence of the Lambs.  Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of the cannibalistic psychiatrist earned him an Oscar in 1991 and the attention of the AFI jurors tasked with naming the best of the worst from movie history.

The best villains, for the AFI’s purposes are “character(s) whose wickedness of mind, selfishness of character and will to power are sometimes masked by beauty and nobility, while others may rage unmasked. They can be horribly evil or grandiosely funny, but are ultimately tragic.” It is easy to see how Lecter easily surpasses his diabolical competition in these categories. Indeed, no less a person than Roger Ebert claimed, “It has been a good long while since I have felt the presence of Evil so manifestly demonstrated as in the first appearance of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs.”

Perhaps it’s the unsettling combination of the sociopath’s menace paired with intellectual brilliance that earns Lecter this top honor. What other big screen villain could deliver such a seemingly innocuous line as “I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner” with so much delightfully sinister intent? Without a doubt, Lecter steals every scene of Silence of the Lambs in which he appears. He may not be “grandiosely funny”, but Hopkins delivers every line, from outright threat to subtle mindplay, with brilliant timing. And although he is confined to a cell for much of the film, Lecter manages to menace with looks and disturb with insinuations until the deadly denouement when he ultimately wreaks murderous havoc in a memorable escape.

Perhaps, though, it is Lecter’s iconic line “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti” (itself enshrined on AFI’s list of top movie quotes) that manages to best encapsulate both his “wickedness of mind” and “nobility” of character in just a dozen tidy words.