Another round
Another significant new feature this week is “Another Round,” by Denmark’s Thomas Vinterberg which won the Oscar for best international feature film. The film centers around a group of bored high school teachers, who embark on an experiment to maintain a constant level of drunkenness throughout the working day, convinced that a light amount of alcohol can help them express themselves and increase their creativity.
Known above all for “Festen” and “The suspect” (his best films together with the latter), Vinterberg returns to sign a moving product, after several feature films that are too constructed at a table. Able to be as entertaining as it is profound, “A another lap »has a good pace and, with the exception of a few drops in the central part, it is engaging at the right point.
Well framed by a beautiful incipit and, above all, by a remarkable ending, the film lives of significant moments inserted in an overall design, however effective and incisive, at times not completely spontaneous but still capable of touching deep chords. of the actors on the field, starting with the protagonist Mads Mikkelsen, one of the best and most appreciated Danish performers of his generation.
The woman at the window and Oxygène
Two highly anticipated high-tension titles have recently been available on Netflix: Joe Wright’s “Woman in the Window” and Alexandre Aja’s “Oxygène”. The first is a film starring Amy Adams as a woman who suffers from agoraphobia , he never leaves the house and observes a possible murder from his window. The reference to Hitchcock’s “The Window on the Courtyard” is more than explicit (as well as other titles from the past that are clearly cited), but the director’s intentions to talk about a world in which images shape our perception is soon lost. due to a confused and vainly ambitious script, too thin to bear the complex ideas proposed.
Definitely simpler but far more incisive is «Oxygène», which sees Mélanie Laurent in the role of a woman who wakes up in a mysterious capsule, without remembering how and why she ended up there.