Denmark
Kieron Tyler
Although Windflowers showcases Efterklang at their most direct, its sixth track “Living Other Lives” is its most instant, most straightforward composition. However, the Danish art-poppers’ sixth studio album does not instantly makes its case as a full-bore adoption of up-front dynamics. Windflowers opens with “Alien Arms”, an understated reflection where vocalist Casper Clausen ponders whether the highpoints of the past can be reproduced in the present. Despite the restraint – and an intimate, Blue Nile-esque atmosphere – the flow is linear, the melody precise. “We’re moving through the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This Danish police drama attempts to tackle the country’s uneasy relationship with the immigrants it’s allowed into its cities over the last 30 years. The result is a somewhat clumsy attempt at fusing social commentary with the visceral thrills of an action movie, complete with car chases, shoot outs and muscle-bound fistfights.The title is the Arabic word for police and Shorta opens with a close up of a black teenager, Talib Ben Hassi, shouting "I can’t breathe" as he's held down on the floor by a white officer. It’s a little cheap to reference a real-life atrocity for Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
All events are products of a series of preceding events. Or is life just a chain of coincidences? And if so, what’s the point in anything? Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen’s brilliantly inventive, genre-busting black comedy starts with a bicycle theft, which leads to a train crash, which leads to a wildly over-the-top bloodbath and revenge scenario.This is led by the PTSD-hardened military man Markus (Mads Mikkelsen, a Jensen stalwart), recalled from a tour of duty in the desert because his wife, Emma, was killed in the train crash. His teenage daughter, Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Can a film be both too long and too short? If so, Into the Darkness definitely fits the bill. Anders Refn’s long-nurtured family epic follows Karl Skov (Jesper Christensen, more famous as a Bond villain), a self-made Danish industrialist who struggles with his conscience when his country surrenders to Germany in 1940. Should Skov refuse to manufacture the goods required by his new masters and risk losing not only his comfortable home but also deprive his loyal workers of their livelihood too? And what choices should his sons and daughter make about who they consort Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This year of all years – surely – we need music which takes us to better, happier places. And the new album from Norwegian-born saxophonist/composer Marius Neset does that. It also gives us a bit more hindsight and context as to what his two previous albums involving large ensembles were all about. One can now see more clearly that the 500+ pages of dense orchestral scoring that he painstakingly wrote for his quintet and the London Sinfonietta in Snowmelt and Viaduct were his ‘années de galère’ as a composer.Tributes (ACT) is not simple music by any means, and yet there is a complete sense of Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
You can practically smell the fumes coming off Thomas Vinterberg’s latest drama Another Round, known in Denmark simply as "Druk". Co-written with Tobias Lindholm, the story is anchored in a theory proposed by Finn Skårderud that humans have a blood alcohol level that is 0.05 percent too low. Therefore, to function at our best, we need to top it up. Four friends, all teachers at the same school, gather for a 40th birthday. Despite protests, Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) opts for soda and lemon over booze. However, the onslaught of jeers and teasing from his friends finally make Martin cave in Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well. Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next.” A cosy scene: Anne (the superb Trine Dyrholm: The Legacy; The Commune; Nico, 1988) is reading Alice in Wonderland to her twin daughters in their stylish Danish family house deep in the woods.The Alice-down-the-well analogy could apply to Anne herself. Her marriage to Peter (Magnus Krepper), a hard-working, often absent Read more ...
graham.rickson
CPE Bach: Complete Piano Trios Linos Piano Trio (C-Avi)13 piano trios squeezed onto just two discs is a steal, but we’re talking CPE Bach and not Schubert, and there’s the issue of whether these pieces are piano trios in the accepted sense. Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach’s London publisher issued the Wq 89 set in 1776, describing them as “Six Sonatas for the Harpsichord or Pianoforte accompanied by Violin and Violincello”. The composer variously referred to them as trios, sonatas or “Trios (which are also Solos)”. They were an instant success, and Bach added a further set shortly afterwards Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
U-Bahn’s second-ever live show outside their home country Australia took place in Aalborg, in Jutland, in the north of Denmark. They were in this congenial, routinely rain-sodden city last weekend for Northern Winter Beat, the annual festival of established, offbeat and up-and-coming musical adventurers.The Melbourne oddballs’ (pictured above) debut album attracted attention for its seeming determination to borrow much of the early Devo’s shtick. Live, however, they are something else. The herk-jerk, tick-tock patterns are present and correct but what’s apparent a minute into “Beta Boyz”, Read more ...
David Nice
Not everyone who flocked to Day Two's evening concert in Kings Place's year-long Nature Unwrapped: Sounds of Life celebrations will have realised that they were catching parts two and three of a trilogy. The masterpiece had come earlier, in a 5pm screening: Phie Ambo's poetic documentary Good Things Await, about the tenacity of eccentric Danish biodynamic farmer Niels Stokholm and the obstacles he faces from rigid authorities. There's choral music in there, from Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, performed on the soundtrack by Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices, whose first soprano Else Torp Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first feature by Copenhagen-born director Ulaa Salim dives boldly into a cauldron of hot-button issues – terrorism, racism, nationalism and fascism. It’s set in 2025, in a Denmark suffering from bomb attacks and violently polarised politics. This climate has spawned the titular Sons of Denmark. They’re a gang of neo-Nazis preaching racial purity and zero tolerance of immigrants, singling out Muslims for especially hostile treatment, threatening them with severed pig’s heads and slogans daubed in blood.We don’t get to learn much about the Sons of Denmark themselves, who remain sinister, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The English-language drama Holiday, Danish filmmaker Isabella Eklöf’s feature debut, is an anthropological study of the corrosive effects of absolute male power and calcified misogyny. Inspired by a book written by Eklöf’s co-writer Johanne Algren and drawing on their experiences, as well as those of their gifted lead actor Victoria Carmen Sonne, it’s a harrowing movie – one of the most urgent of the #MeToo era.After deplaning at an airport that serves the Turkish Riviera and coaching into the port town of Bodrum, the protagonist Sascha (Sonne), a fragile woman of about 22, crouches on Read more ...