The Best Challenging Movies to Watch (+Language: Danish)
One of the cinema’s most noble roles is to challenge pre-conceived perceptions and tackle difficult questions about humanity and the world. Here are some of the most important and topically challenging movies to stream right now.
In the first twenty minutes, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin seemed to be quite unremarkable, with the usual way a biographical documentary would go, that is, loved ones waxing poetic about how great the dead person was in life. But the documentary takes this to introduce Ibelin the same way his parents discovered the online […]
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x4Given the original real-life story behind it, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that The Girl with the Needle was so bleak. Serial killing, after all, is bad. But rather than focus on the historical killer, writer-director Magnus von Horn hones the camera to focus on one such mother that would have sought for help from […]
On the one hand, Godland is a film about nature’s unforgiving beauty. Like the photographs the priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) takes, these quietly superb scenes speak for themselves. The Earth moves in mysterious and harsh ways, and we are but mere specks, organic matter to be folded in and absorbed, in the grand scheme […]
1899 is for viewers who love twisty big-budgeted shows in the vein of HBO’s Westworld and Amazon Prime’s Peripheral. It’s set in the titled year and follows migrants from all walks of life as they set sail for New York, the land of opportunity. There’s a priest from Spain, a couple from France, and a […]
While best known for his provocative, existential dramas, Lars von Trier also made a provocative mini-series with surprising supernatural horror. Set at Denmark’s leading public hospital, The Kingdom takes familiar medical drama conflicts in handheld camera and sepia tone, but infused with an unsettling understanding of how the finest minds can fail, and how small […]
Netflix’s resurrection of the hit Danish drama Borgen comes in the form of Borgen: Power & Glory, a miniseries that sees Birgitte Nyborg (played by powerhouse Sidse Babett Knudsen) step down as prime minister and take over the foreign minister position while wrangling over power, principle, and family. In this particular revival, Birgitte butts head […]
In 1994, Danish auteur Lars von Trier came up with a TV series called The Kingdom, an absurd supernatural comedy that takes place in a rundown hospital in Copenhagen. The show was well-received enough to warrant a second season, but just as von Trier was polishing up the third and final installment, the deaths of […]