Dogma Films

Several lonely hearts in a semi-provincial suburb of a town in Denmark use a beginner’s course in Italian as the platform to meet the romance of their lives. The film unspools the connections and family drama shared between the students.Read More »

Kresten’s dad dies and he returns to the farm on Lolland to take care of things incl. his retarded brother. He employs a hooker as maid. He loses wife and job due to lies. The maid’s kid brother moves in and they’re a family of 4.

DOGME 95 #3Read More »

When a bus breaks down in the desert, the passengers decide to stage “King Lear.”

Thinking Inside the Box
Rating * Has redeeming facet

The King Is Alive, directed and cowritten by Kristian Levring, is the fourth film to have the dubious honor of qualifying for certification under the rules of the Dogma 95 manifesto, whose professed aim is to get back to the basics of realism — shooting, for example, in natural locations with handheld cameras, direct sound, and natural lighting. But what’s basic or realistic and what isn’t, in terms of film history and technique? The manifesto also insists that movies be shot in color, a rather ahistorical reading of what’s basic — unless one labels all possible uses of color in film realistic and all possible uses of black and white artificial.Read More »

En Kærlighedshistorie AKA Dogme # 21

REVIEW by Scott Tobias (from avclub.com):
The 21st film to receive official Dogme certification, and one of the few unharmed by its minimalist limitations, Ole Christian Madsen’s powerful Kira’s Reason: A Love Story could be the undercard to A Woman Under The Influence, John Cassavetes’ seminal study of a marriage and mental illness. Beginning with a wife’s return home after time in a psychiatric ward, both films gain their tension from the strained attempt to return to normalcy after everything has irrevocably changed, a transitional phase made all the more painful by brief flashes of the couple’s old dynamic. Though Madsen’s middle-class heroes have little in common with Cassavetes’ more combative blue-collar counterparts, their reunion is similarly raw, painful, and unexpectedly romantic, as they try to redefine their relationship around a new set of terms. Looking and acting uncannily like a young Genevieve Bujold, Stine Stengade gives a touchingly unhinged performance as the title character, a madwoman who tries to find her footing as a wife and mother after being committed for an unspecified condition.Read More »

The group of people gather at the house in Copenhagen suburb to break all the limitations and to bring out the “inner idiot” in themselves.Read More »

Quote:
A road-movie about two friends, Peter and Chris, in their late 20′s, one incredibly idealistic and optimistic; the other cynically nihilistic and negative. They pick up a Vespa in South Dakota and travel with it to Los Angeles. As they travel through the northwest to the southwest, they see their country through different eyes. Chris has high expectations and romantic notions of America. Peter sees the emptiness of America with lost ideals and lost people. While they do not discover the identity of America on their road trip, they ultimately find themselves…Read More »

In a city suburb, a young minister arrives to take up duties at a local church. He is persuaded by his assistant to join an Italian night school class, and he soon becomes the centre of a group of people to whom fate has dealt quite serious blows.Read More »

Quote:
Rarely is a making-of doc so perfectly matched in tone or storyline as the subject of its gaze, but The Idiots and The Humiliated are furiously intertwined, in a mindgame kind of way that seems quite — Von Trier-ian? Filmmaker Jesper Jargil accepted an assistant director post on The Idiots under the condition that he be allowed to make his own film about the film, and the result is as personal and scarring as Von Trier’s masterwork. Using the same DV cameras as Von Trier was using, Jargil covers the actors and director living in the same communal space (much as the film’s characters do), and as Lars pushes his actors to the brink of emotional endurance, he himself goes bonkers in a paranoid, hypochondriachal fit — and the viewer is left feeling as if the whole production is the brainchild of a semi-mad cult leader intent on instantly capturing on tape every neurosis he wishes to purge in the real world. Unprecedented and ultra-rare, The Humiliated is an intimate meta thrill ride.Read More »

“Idioterne is the cinematic equivalent of a knife in your gut. The Idiots is altogether a complex, maddening, devastating, kaleidoscopic one-of-a-kind viewing experience.”Read More »