He fights a battle for land and order

 

 A single-minded former military officer wants to develop a farm on soil has been deemed too tough to till. An unscrupulous land baron stands in his way.

  That may sound like a dozen Westerns you've seen, but The Promised Land, a sturdy frontier drama, takes place in mid-18th Century Denmark. 

  Mads Mikkelsen, at his flinty best, anchors a story that pits his character, the bastard child of a nobleman, against a sadistic aristocrat (Simon Bennebjerg) who'll do anything to maintain control of the Jutland heath.

   Director Nikolaj Arcel leans heavily on Mikkelsen's sternly chiseled performance while introducing themes that touch on racism and the cruelties of a hierarchical society.

   The Promised Land has as clearly a drawn villain as you could want. Bennebjerg's Frederik De Schinkel favors horrific measures of control, including scalding a runaway tenant farmer with boiling water. He brutally rapes the women who serve on his estate.

  Recognizable to American audiences for his work in Casino Royale (2006) and more recently, Indiana Jones the Dial of Destiny, Mikkelsen gives his Ludvig von Kahlen, the battle-scarred aura of a man who has seen too much.

   But Kahlen refuses to be defeated. He wants to spread civilization to the heath, and, in the long term, earn the status and recognition of a nobleman.

   No revolutionary, Kahlen doesn't aim to topple the prevailing order. He hopes to join it, and he believes he can curry the king's favor by proving that the land on the heath is arable. 

     Seen only once and briefly, the king wants to settle the  heath but his skeptical advisors work against him. They allow Kahlen to proceed as a way to humor the king. But they believe that even the strong-willed Kahlen won't be able to conquer the heath.

   Initially, Kahlen finds three allies for his work: a paster (Gustav Lindh) who wants to build a church on the heath and a couple (Morten Hee Andersen and Amanda Collin) who've fled Schinkel's tyranny.

   Kahlen also cares for a Roma child (Melina Hagberg) whose dark complexion turns her into an outcast and allows Arcel to expose the racist superstitions of the settlers Kahlen finally attracts.

   At various points, Kahlen also encounters an admiring noblewoman (Kristine Kujath Thorp) who disdains the prospect of marriage to Schinkel. She has her eye on him in a way that he can't quite handle.

   Gradually, Kahlen turns his crew into a family and by the film's end, we realize that Arcel has been staging a stark character study in which Kahlen's commitment to order collides with Schinkel's belief in a chaos, which he uses to justify his abominable behavior.

    I won't give away important plot points but relationships with Collin's character, who serves as a housekeeper, and with Hagberg's character allow Kahlen's humanity to emerge -- albeit in ways that don't break faith with the staunch fiber that compels him.

    The movie's third act feels a bit too compressed, and The Promised Land occasionally flirts with melodrama, but it tells an involving story that embodies the spirit of the bleak, unforgiving landscape on which it unfolds.

 

Bob's Cinema Diary: 5/14/21 -- "Riders of Justice' and "Djinn'

 Riders of Justice 
The Danish film Riders of Justice qualifies as a bona fide curiosity, a film in which shocking violence plays against a comic backdrop in which an unlikely alliance tries to  deliver its own brand of justice. The alliance consists of a seasoned warrior (Mads Mikkelsen) and three nerdy companions (Nikolaj Lie Kass, Nicolas Bro, and Lars Brygmann). A soldier suffering from PTSD, Mikkelsen's Markus returns from the front when his wife (Anne Birgitte Lind) dies in a vividly presented train crash. Markus's teenaged daughter (Andrea Heick Gadeberg) survives and the two are left to cope (or not) with grief. Enter a statistician (Nikolaj Lie Kass) who was on the demolished train and who claims that it's statistically impossible for the crash to have been an accident.  Lie Kass's Otto  enlists Markus in a revenge plot that also draws in a computer expert (Bro) and an all-around geek (Brygman). The movie can't always balance seriousness and humor, but director Anders Thomas Jensen goes heavy on themes: from child sexual abuse to the over-reliance on science to the fraught relationship between Markus and Mathilde's preternaturally accommodating boyfriend (Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt). As suspects in the train crash, The Riders of Justice gang becomes the focal point of an investigatory/revenge plot. To appreciate Riders of Justice, imagine a revenge movie in which the characters all have backstories that ultimately are revealed in serious conversations. These moments can be touching and Jensen never forgets that a terrible sense of loss underlies the entire enterprise. I can't say that Riders of Justice totally succeeds in seamlessly blending its many ingredients, but Mikkelsen's tough performance and the rest of the cast keep the movie from jumping its tracks -- or at least jumping them in weirdly provocative  ways.

The Djinn

A minimalist slice of contemporary horror, The Djinn offers an efficient blending of sound, image, and jolts. A slender story revolves around a boy (Ezra Dewey) whose DJ father (Rob Brownstein) has left him alone for the night. Dewey's Dylan can hear but he can't speak. While rummaging through a closet, as kids are wont to do, Dewey finds a thick, obviously strange book that tells him he'll be granted one wish, assuming that he survives a night with The Djinn.  The movie's monstrous demon appears in different forms and does its best to make Dylan's survival as difficult as possible. Routine horror ploys proliferate: A TV that shows nothing but static and a boombox that turns itself on and off. The boy also sees images of his mother (Tevy Poe), a woman who left Dewey and his dad before the movie begins. On screen by himself for most of the movie, Dewey delivers a convincing performance but directors David Charbonier and Justin Powell may be trapped by their movie’s minimalism. Sometimes, minimalism produces only minimal impact.

'Chaos Walking:' A run might have been better

 

   First, a quick look at the world of Chaos Walking, a futuristic story about warring deep-space colonists that trips over one of its central conceits. In Chaos Walking, men can hear each other's thoughts, a power achieved upon arrival on this distant planet.

   Adapting a YA novel by Patrick Ness, director Doug Limon allows us to hear the thoughts of the male characters who live in the Prentisstown colony. Not only does the collective babble create confusion, it adds little by way of interest because so many of the thoughts we hear tend to be obvious or repetitive.

  Having been raised in Prentisstown, Todd (Tom Holland) only knows the world of men. The town's women all died shortly after Todd's birth: Todd has bought the official line, which insists the women were killed by the Spackle, the original residents of this unnamed planet.

   When we meet him, Todd mostly accepts the local philosophy, a kill-or-be-killed ethos that has turned Prentisstown into a grim dystopian outpost. Todd lives with his father Ben (Damian Bichir) and accepts the iron-fisted discipline of Prentisstown's mayor (Mads Mikkelsen). 

  Todd's world changes when Viola (Daisy Ridley) arrives on the planet after the crash of her spaceship during an interplanetary scouting mission dispatched by a larger vessel.

  Most of the story puts Todd and Viola on the run, as they try to find a way to signal Viola's mothership so that it won't leave her behind.

   Todd's dog Manchee tags along. Happily, there's no suggestion that anyone can read Manchee's thoughts or that Manchee can penetrate anyone else's mind. 

    Having never seen a woman before, Todd's thoughts often put him in an embarrassing position vis-a-vis Viola, who can hear his thoughts.  

    Men, by the way, can't hear women's thoughts, thus leading the movie toward a limp metaphor about gender differences: Transparent creatures that they are, men can't hear women. Some of the men are deeply opposed to any female intrusion into their private worlds.

   The supporting cast proves largely irrelevant. David Oyelowo portrays Aaron, a censorious preacher who occasionally pops up to orate. Cynthia Erivo's Hildy leans another colony, one that still has women and is far more peaceable than Prentisstown.

    Exoticism proves in short supply. The planet on which the movie takes place looks pretty much like Earth and the various encounters that Todd and Viola have with others aren't all that intriguing. The action (a white-water episode, for example) seems pretty familiar, as well.

     The chemistry between Holland and Ridley doesn't exactly sizzle, and Mikkelsen's low-key villainy breaks little new ground.

   Aside from the discovery of a vast, previously crashed ship, Chaos Walking lacks sci-fi scale. It almost feels as if the characters are playing at inhabiting a new planet without ever having left Earth.

   I've read that The Knife of Never Letting Go is the first in the Chaos Walking series.  My commercial instincts are extremely fallible, so take this with a grain of salt: It's difficult for me to imagine that more Chaos Walking movies loom.

A movie about men and their crazy ideas

 

If Another Round, the latest film from director Thomas Vinterberg, is any indication, Denmark might be badly in need of a national 12-step program.  As the title suggests, Another Round takes on the subject of excessive drinking, tying it to the sagging ego of its main character, a high school teacher convincingly played by Mads Mikkelsen. 

    Mikkelsen portrays Martin, a middle-aged man who seems to have lost his Mojo. He's become an indifferent teacher and husband. His wife (Maria Bonnevie) works nights and he doesn't pay a lot of attention to his teenage children. 

    The story kicks in when Martin attends the 40th birthday celebration of a colleague (Magnus Millang). As the evening’s designated driver, Martin initially resists taking a drink but finally decides to join the party.

     Not long after this celebratory night, Martin has an idea. Citing a Norwegian psychologist, he suggests that he and his pals test a hypothesis that claims they all need to raise their alcohol content by .5 points. The four men agree. Suddenly, they begin to snap out of their doldrums. Martin once again reaches his students and his cronies seem to be faring equally well. 

   It takes no crystal ball to predict where all this alcohol consumption will take the men, especially when they decide to push things to dangerous heights. Physical ed teacher Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen) fares worst and Vinterberg doesn't shy from questions about addiction. 

    But what keeps Another Round from becoming another cautionary tale about excessive consumption is its recognition that men living deadened lives are willing to risk everything to feel the soaring intensity of being fully alive, of breaking from the routine that seems to have numbed them all.

      Sure, these guys should have known better than to fool with a substance that has life-wrecking potential but Vinterberg isn't one to wag a finger in the faces of characters who’ve chosen obviously ruinous paths. Together with Mikkelsen, he makes the movie’s theme clear: Martin becomes a case study in what can happen to men when all sense of promise drains from their lives. 

Battling to survive in the frozen Arctic

There aren't many movies in which weather plays a role in deciding whether you might want to see them. But I'd think twice about seeing Joe Penna's Arctic if you're in the middle of a brutal winter cold spell. The story of a man struggling to survive the extreme temperatures of the Arctic after his small plane crashes offers the kind of bone-chilling realism that makes you feel every bit of hardship, even as you wonder whether the movie's main character (Mads Mikkelsen) will survive. Much of the movie involves watching Mikkelsen's Overgard improvise ways to keep himself alive; i.e., drill holes in the ice to catch fish, hand-cranking a radio to send out a distress signal and trying to stay as warm as possible inside the cabin of his downed aircraft. Eventually, Overgard discovers another crash and begins to care for its lone survivor (Maria Thelma Smaradottir,), a woman who never entirely regains consciousness and who battles sickness and fever. Eventually, Overgard realizes he can no longer stay put. He improvises a sled, bundles the woman in blankets and begins the long march toward what he hopes will be an outpost of civilization. Watching Mikkelsen lumber through snow or ascend hills proves both gripping and agonizing. One horrific challenge follows another until the movie reaches its conclusion. I'm a sucker for this kind of big-screen authenticity, and Arctic makes for a harrowing slice of life-or-death adventure.

A feverish movie about van Gogh

Yes, there have been many movies about Vincent Van Gogh, but At Eternity's Gate is one made by a painter, Julian Schnabel.

No artist seems to have inspired more filmmakers than Vincent van Gogh, not only because van Gogh survives as a painter of obvious art-historical importance but because his life helped to create the classic portrait of the suffering artist, the unrecognized genius who searches for spiritual exultation but also crashes back to earth. In van Gogh's case that meant cutting off his left ear and serving time in a mental asylum.

Julian Schnabel, a well-known contemporary artist and filmmaker, now joins the van Gogh fray with At Eternity's Gate, a movie focusing mostly on van Gogh's life in Arles, which serves as a kind of preface to his untimely and still somewhat mysterious death. He was shot in the stomach but there's disagreement about whether van Gogh was murdered or killed himself. He was 37 when he died in 1890.

Schnabel uses van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, invented dialogue and some of the actual locations where van Gogh painted to bolster what amounts to an interpretive plunge into van Gogh's alternately soaring, alternately troubled mind, conveyed with disturbing authenticity by actor Willem Dafoe.

Schnabel, who wrote the screenplay with Louise Kugelberg and Jean-Claude Carriere, presents a view of the artist as a visionary who saw through to the essence of reality in nature but, ironically, began to lose touch with reality in his own life, often failing to remember important events.

The movie's most impressive support comes from Oscar Isaac as Paul Gaugin, a far more self-assured artist than van Gogh whose lack of prominence during his lifetime continually caused him to question his own ability.

Rupert Friend portrays Theo, van Gogh's tender, accepting brother and patron. Mads Mikkelsen plays a priest who's assigned the task of judging van Gogh's mental state before he's released from an asylum and turned back into the world.

Mathieu Amalric, who appeared in Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, portrays Dr. Gachet, the physician who cared for van Gogh and became the subject of one his most famous portraits. Emmanuelle Seigner plays Marie Ginoux, another subject of a van Gogh portrait and owner of a cafe in Arles, the town where van Gogh drank -- often too much. French actor Niels Arestrup has a brief but compelling turn as a fellow patient at the asylum where van Gogh commits himself.

Schnabel spends time showing van Gogh developing his relationship with nature -- at first simply observing, then sketching and finally painting.

Van Gogh heads to Arles for sunlight but arrives at a moment when the land remains under the grip of winter's chill. A desolate image of a field of lifeless sunflowers suggests that moribund nature awaits van Gogh's reviving eye.

At one point, Gaugin tells van Gogh that he paints too fast and overpaints; i.e., he uses so much paint his art tends to look like sculpture, presumably a conversation that Schnabel imagined van Gogh and Gaugin might have had.

I had a roughly similar feeling about cinematographer Benoit Delhomme's hand-held work. At best, Delhomme uses his camera to simulate the rapid strokes of a palette knife or the darting of the painter's eyes. But an unsteady camera also proves disorienting. And some of the visual tricks of focus and non-focus push too hard to give us a view of what van Gogh might have seen during episodes in which he's losing his grip.

Then, there's the question of age. Dafoe is 63 years old. Amazingly, casting him as van Gogh in his 30s doesn't prove distracting because we're witnessing an intensely subjective account of van Gogh's final years. Think of Dafoe as the embodiment of van Gogh's old soul.

For the most part, Schnabel tries to keep his work contemporaneous with van Gogh's exploratory intellect. In an early picture episode, van Gogh approaches a young woman who's herding sheep.

"Look at me," he implores, saying he wants to sketch her.

Van Gogh yearned to be seen -- not as an act of an unsatisfied ego but as the fulfillment of what he saw as a calling. Van Gogh's desire to share his vision underlies nearly everything that happens as Schnabel moves from one part of the story to the next, allowing the screen to sink into blackness between each of the movie's vignettes.

Not one for creative timidity, Schnabel even begins the movie daringly. We see a darkened screen and hear van Gogh talking about his very simple desire for acceptance and comfort. There aren't many directors who'd begin a movie about one of the world's most famous artist with words rather than with an image.

At Eternity's Gate marks the second film Schnabel has made about a painter. His first feature -- 1996's Basquiat -- looked at another painter whose life ended early. Jean-Michel Basquiat was 28 when a heroin overdose cut his life short.

If you're interested in understanding the mood Schnabel creates in his second movie about someone who can be viewed as an art-world casualty, you might want to take a look at the painting for which the movie is named. That painting was made by van Gogh in 1890, the year of his death. It shows a balding man sitting on a wooden chair in front of a sketchily drawn fire. The man's elbows rest on his thighs. His head is buried in his clenched fists. Presumably, he's thinking about his death, which may be imminent.

Can van Gogh's subject find something redeeming in this moment of sorrowful apprehension? You may want to think about that question as you watch Dafoe become van Gogh in Schnabel's boldly conceived, if somewhat jagged, interpretation.*

My favorite movie about artist Vincent van Gogh remains director Paul Cox's Vincent, a documentary that made its way into theaters in 1987. To make his movie, Cox used van Gogh's paintings, the locations in which the painter worked and excerpts from letters van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo. The combination allowed Cox to capture van Gogh's search for transcendence, a spiritual journey anchored in the earthy realities of the landscapes that compelled him.

War? What's it good for? A 'Star Wars' movie that pits rebels against the Death Star

Rogue One may stand alone, but it doesn't stand above the best Star Wars movies.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story takes place at a time when The Empire, imperial source of all evil, is in the process of constructing a Death Star, a weapon so powerful it can destroy entire planets.

As familiar as that may sound, Rogue One turns out to be a slightly different kind of Star Wars adventure. Production notes for the movie describe it as a stand-alone effort -- albeit one that's meant to fit into the Star Wars universe.

Led by director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Monsters), the Disney team takes us on a less-than-epic tour of a darkly hued Star Wars world. We meet a ragtag group of rebels that fights the massive Empire, but the movie mostly takes the twinkle out of Star Wars' eyes, opting instead for a battle-heavy extravaganza with stunt-and-grunt impact.

Felicity Jones plays Jyn Erso, a young woman whose father was a scientist who tried to hide from the Empire but later was captured and forced to work on the Death Star. When the movie opens, Jyn and her father (Mads Mikkelsen) are living in isolation on a remote planet.

Troops from the Empire swoop in, kill Jyn's mom and take Dad prisoner. Jyn escapes, and grows into a young woman who's recruited by rebels.

Cinematographer Grieg Fraser (Zero Dark Thirty, Foxcatcher) seems to prefer dark imagery that often obscures the actors, which isn't altogether bad considering that Jones's performance feels a bit muted. She's the latest version of a female protagonist who can handle herself -- and others.

Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) leads the rebel mission which is supposed to locate Jyn's father. Neither Cassian nor Jyn initially wants anything to do with the other; it's not providing anything by way of spoilers to say that their relationship evolves -- although it doesn't ignite much by way of sparks.

The other characters include Chirrut (Donnie Yen), a blind monk who knows how to use The Force. Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen) serves as Chirrut's less well-kempt pal.

Other characters include the morally ambivalent Bodhi (Riz Ahmed), and K-2SO, a long-armed droid voiced by Alan Tudyk with 3-CPO intonations. K-2SO comes closest to giving the movie a big of comic spin. It tells you something about this massive enterprise that the character with the most humor is a droid.

The opening of the movie does a bit of confusing planet hopping, before explaining the role that's being played by an oxygen-snorting character portrayed by Forest Whitaker.

You'll also see brief appearances from Darth Vader, but the evil Empire mostly falls under the leadership of Krennic, who appears in a white cape and is played by the always menacing Ben Mendelsohn.

Alien creatures also appear, but this time, few are played for laughs.

I always get a bit lost in Star Wars jargon, so forgive me if I'm wrong in saying the planet Jedha is where much of the movie's explosive urban warfare takes place. A climactic battle is set on Scarif, a planet with beaches and palm trees that give the movie a war-in-the-Pacific flavor.

By the end, Edwards pretty much turns Rogue One into an action blur (on the ground and in space), an interminable battle in which, among other things, space ships and space stations ram into one another with brute force, but without much by way of the rousing thrills.

References to predecessor movies let us know that we are, indeed, in the Star Wars universe, and Rogue One definitely benefits from the association. I'm not sure how it would fare as separate hunk of sci-fi. Probably not so well.

Edwards evidently wanted a bit of war-movie verisimilitude to characterize this journey into the Star Wars universe. That doesn't mean there's no zap and pow to the battles, but it makes you wonder whether the filmmakers have had a memory lapse. Isn't Star Wars supposed to be a fantasy -- telling but still a fantasy?

Oh well, the Star Wars canon is vast, and more movies are planned. But for all its huffing and puffing, this one only intermittently feels like a full-blown helping of deep-space fun.

One thing you can bet on: Devotees don't much care what critics think and will spend lots of time hashing this one out among themselves. If you've grown past that point in your life, I wouldn't say Rogue One, though hardly a bad movie, offers sufficient reason not to get on with other business.

An amusing appointment with 'Doctor Strange'

Like many of you, I've grown weary of movies derived from Marvel Comics. So when a choice presented itself last week -- see Dr. Strange, another movie from the Marvel machine, or Moonlight, a much-praised movie that lit up the fall festival circuit -- I chose Moonlight. I was, however, pleasantly surprised when, on a weekend catch-up mission, I saw Doctor Strange. Sporting an American accent, Benedict Cumberbatch plays the title character, an ultra-rational neurosurgeon who learns to submerge his ego by mastering the mystical ways of the East -- or least Marvel's idea of what such ways might be. Initially, Strange heads eastward in hopes of restoring damage done to his precious hands in a devastating automobile accident. In Kathmandu, Tilda Swinton's Ancient One gradually initiates Strange into the mysteries of her universe -- with help from her sidekick Chiwetel Ejiofor's Mordo. Cumberbatch nails Strange's arrogance and makes the doctor's transition to a superhero credible. An appealing Rachel McAdams signs on as a former colleague and love interest of Dr. Strange, and Mads Mikkelsen plays Kaecilius, the villain of the piece. The plot is mushy Marvel pap, but the fun of director Scott Derrickson's movie has less to do with story than with the special-effects show that Derrickson puts on: Inception-like inward collapses of buildings, odd intersections of reality and alternate realities, and Dr. Strange's cape, which seems to have a mind of its own. Just as important, the movie has a sense of playfulness that makes Dr. Strange feel reasonably fresh -- at least until the obligatory epilogue that comes at the conclusion of the end credits. So three cheers for Derrickson and his crew. They've defeated a ton of preposterous dialogue and a plot that could have encouraged indifference to create an enjoyable comic book movie.

A Danish director makes a Western

The Salvation, a Western made by a Danish director who shot his film in South Africa, offers more proof that national lines are being shredded by globalism.

Perhaps inspired by director Sergio Leone's top-drawer spaghetti westerns, director Kristian Levring serves up a revenge saga in which forlorn western landscapes provide a backdrop for the savage brutality that's brought to bear on a town full of innocent homesteaders.

Mads Mikkelsen plays Jon, a Danish immigrant whose newly arrived wife and young son are viciously murdered in what amounts to the film's prologue. Jon's wife, of course, is also raped, sexual violation being an indispensable element in any vigorous big-screen revenge saga.

Instead of pursuing the agrarian life he sought in the New World, Jon finds himself engaged in a very American activity -- at least as far as movies are concerned: He must pursue personal justice in the face of rampant lawlessness.

This battle puts him at odds with the town's merciless enforcer, a man named Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Delaure has his own revenge agenda: Early on, Jon kills Delarue's brother, one of the outlaws who destroyed Jon's family.

Not surprisingly, the thoroughly cowed townsfolk refuse to stand up against Delarue.

The local undertaker (Jonathan Pryce) is also the mayor, a self-interested man who's willing to sacrifice his neighbors for what he deems the greater good.

The local pastor (Douglas Henshall) doubles as the town's sheriff. Like Pryce's Keane, he's a man of dubious morality.

Eva Green portrays a woman whose face has been scarred when she was captured by Indians, who also ripped out her tongue. She was married to Delarue's brother, but that doesn't stop Delarue from pushing her into his bed.

With a major assist from his grizzled-looking cast -- particularly the stony faced Mikkelsen -- Levring creates a Western in which the frontier exemplifies lawlessness and exploitation, subject only to the raw justice of the gun.

Perhaps to add a bit of additional spin, oil becomes the demon substance behind much of the movie's violence. Capitalist greed adds a bit of spice to the movie's violent stew.

The Salvation stirs up primal lusts, dishes out brute behavior and tries to be as stoic as possible while doing it. Levring seems too devoted to genre tropes to transcend them, but he knows his way around a drama that -- at root -- is all about vengeance through bloodshed. Be prepared to get splashed.

Indigestible chaos in Romania

In Charlie Countryman, first-time Swedish director Fredrik Bond tosses off some interesting images, even when he's trying to keep things looking seedy. Fair to say that Bond and his director of cinematography, Roman Vasyanov, prove they have eyes for unusual shots. Storytelling? That's another matter. Chaotic to the point of confusion, the movie casts Shia LaBeouf as a young man adrift after his mother's death: Bond can't find a groove that makes sense of the journey LaBeouf's character takes: from Chicago to Bucharest. Why Bucharest? Charlie's recently departed mom (Melissa Leo) appears to her son in a vision and instructs him to head for Romania. On his flight to Bucharest, Charlie meets Victor (Ion Carmitru), a warm-hearted Cubs fan who dies before the plane lands. Once in Bucharest, Charlie looks up the daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) Victor told him about before his unfortunate demise. It shouldn't surprise anyone that Charlie falls in love or that his romantic pursuit is not problem free. Charlie's interest in Wood's Gabi upsets Nigel (Mads Mikkelsen), a handsome but vicious thug who was once Gabi's lover. As he wanders around Bucharest, Charlie also meets Darko (Til Schweiger), a gangster who -- like Nigel -- is looking for a videocassette that seems to have some importance in advancing what little story can be found. Adopting a Ratso Rizzo-like shuffle and a haggard look, LaBeouf becomes the naive tourist in a city inhabited by bizarre, sometimes dangerous characters. He also meets a couple of companions at a youth hostel (James Buckley and Rupert Grint). Working with a less-than-convincing accent, Wood doesn't seem quite tantalizing enough to justify Charlie's willingness to die for love, and Charlie Countryman (originally titled The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman) emerges as little more than a pop pastiche that travels an awfully long way to go nowhere.

A Danish town without pity

A teacher is falsely accused of molesting a child.

Big-screen horror usually involves stomach-turning amounts of blood and gore, much of it resulting from paranormal invasions into ordinary life. Even when applied with skill, the chills of contemporary horror tend to cast other-worldly shadows.

A different and far more unsettling form of horror derives from events that unfold without the presence of demonic forces. We're talking about the kind of nightmares that result from recognizable behavior.

The Hunt -- a Danish movie from director Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration) -- is one such movie, a serious and powerful demonstration of what can happen when a man is falsely accused of child molestation.

Focusing on a kindergarten teacher (Mads Mikkelsen) in a small Danish town, Vinterberg tells a story in which a lie told by a child threatens to ruin the lives of the teacher and his teen-age son.

The Hunt can't be classified as a thriller because there's never any question about the teacher's innocence. Rather, The Hunt shows how the town's residents -- fueled by righteous indignation -- quickly turn against a friend and neighbor.

Mikkelsen has appeared in mainstream cinematic efforts such as Quantum of Solace and in last year's A Royal Affair. Here, he plays a bespectacled teacher who looks more like Clark Kent than Henry Cavill, the actor who portrayed Superman in the recently released Man of Steel.

Mikkelsen's Lucas has been teaching in a kindergarten because the high school where he taught closed. Before he becomes the object of the town's scorn, he enjoys hearty friendships with the men of the town, who like to hunt and drink. They're a beefy crowd, guys who revel in a the kind of camaraderie that involves taking verbal jabs at one another.

Lucas also is fighting with his ex-wife about the amount of time he's allowed to spend with Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrom), his teen-age son. He'd like the boy to live with him, something Marcus also wants.

What's frightening about Lucas's story is the way in which he becomes isolated. Even a new girlfriend (Alexandra Rapaport) expresses a bit of doubt about him.

In the absence of proof that Lucas molested anyone, the case comes down to Lucas's word against the word of an angelic looking schoolgirl (Annika Wedderkopp). Wedderkopp's Klara acts out a childish and vengeful game, prompted by a pornographic image her older brother briefly (and thoughtlessly) showed her.

I don't know whether Vinterberg was inspired by the current tendency to put children on a pedestal, but the town's people and, more importantly Lucas's boss at the school, tend to believe the girl's story. Children don't lie, the principal insists.

The head of the school doesn't simply investigate, which she's obligated to do. She and others connect the dots in a story that Klara not only invents but later recants.

To add to the complexity of the situation, Klara is the daughter of Lucas's best friend (Thomas Bo Larsen).

The Hunt takes a harrowing look at small town dynamics that threaten to turn a good man into a pariah. To me, that's far more terrifying than most of the demons that haunt today's multiplex screens. What's frightening about Lucas's plight is that it's an all-too-possible ordeal.

Sex, nobility and Enlightened values

The Danish drama, A Royal Affair, mixes lofty ideals and basic human desire.

Dramas involving royal families can produce a mixture of titillating detail and -- if we're lucky -- a sense of higher purpose. The Danish drama, A Royal Affair, provides mild satisfaction on both counts by focusing on an affair between the Queen of Denmark (Alicia Vikander) and the physician (Mads Mikkelsen) who became her husband's most trusted adviser.

The story begins when Vikander's Caroline Mathilde, a member of the British nobility, is shipped to Denmark to marry King Christian VII (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard). Willing but sensitive, Caroline Mathilde quickly discovers that her husband is half fop and half lout, a mentally unstable monarch whose interest in whoring exceeds his interest in just about everything else.

Director Nikolaj Arcel eventually softens his portrayal of King Christian, who turns out to be more malleable than expected. He's also lonely, which is where Mikkelsen's Johann Friedrich Sturensee fits in. A German-born rationalist and committed proponent of Enlightenment values, Sturensee becomes the king's physician. His closeness with the king quickly puts him in an advisory capacity, and Sturensee uses his position to push the king toward all manner of reforms -- forbidding torture, ending privilege for nobles and allowing some freedom of the press, to name several.

These reforms don't come without opposition. Accustomed to running the country, ministers of the Danish cabinet have come to regard the king as little more than a royal rubber stamp. Members of the cabinet, as well as representatives of the church, aren't happy about ceding any of their authority to an intermittently deranged king and his German confidant.

So much for the movie's higher ambitions.

Now for the bed-hopping. The queen and Sturensee wind up as lovers. Their affair proves costly to them, but useful to the aggrieved nobles and their allies in the church, two groups that want to put both the king and the peasantry back in their places.

Mikkelsen, who played a Bond villain in Casino Royale, and Vikander, currently on view in Anna Karenina, generate the right amount of swooning chemistry, and, as the king, Folsgaard inspires real pathos. His King Christian can seem as lost as he is out of control.

All of this plays out with the right amount of period-piece authenticity, and A Royal Affair -- Denmark's submission in this year's foreign-language-film Oscar category -- proves that the path toward reform can be paved with both the highest ideals and the most common of desires.