Denmark
Nick Hasted
Half Man Half Biscuit have nothing on this. Splicing The Three Stooges and Island of Dr Moreau, this strange Danish film finds both slapstick and pathos in its grotesque premise. Part of the micro-genre in which adopted children search for biological parents, it takes its protagonists on some especially twisted country back-roads to get to where they’re going.Elias (Mads Mikkelsen) and Gabriel (David Dencik) have always been mismatched brothers. Hangdog university professor Gabriel inwardly despairs of his compulsively masturbating, gauche and rage-prone sibling. So when their late father Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This concluding mini-series starring the sorrowful Swede began with a bizarre misfire set in South Africa, but redeemed itself with a finale imbued with persuasively Wallander-ish characteristics. The light was grey, flat and menacing. Landscape shots stretched lugubriously as far as the eye could see, encompassing forbidding lakes, shivering forests and damp fields.Meanwhile, Wallander himself was steadily falling apart. This closing story, "The Troubled Man" (★★★★), reached back into the Cold War past and the ambivalent obscurities of espionage and subterfuge, which writer Peter Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The premise driving A War – lead character Claus Pedersen’s war – is the decision he makes as Company Commander while leading an army patrol in Afghanistan: whether or not to say he and his Danish unit are under attack from a specific house in a village.Up to this pivotal moment, Pedersen (Pilou Asbæk) and his fellow soldiers are seen in their camp and going out on patrol. Routine. The day-to-day life of his wife and children, at home in Copenhagen, is contrasted with the posting. Although apart, each lives in a pressure cooker: his due to the conflict; hers as a result of dealing with their Read more ...
David Nice
Unquestionably one of the greats as a performer, Danish-Israeli violinist and conductor Nikolaj Znaider divides opinion over his forthright views in interview: either honourable and refreshingly candid, or troublingly indiscreet. After an hour and a half with him between the two finals of the Carl Nielsen International Violin Competition in Odense, I plump fervently for the former. Meanwhile, an online scandal sheet jumped to conclusions and labelled the whole event as a "shambles" by misrepresenting what Znaider said about a competitor who didn't make it to the finals and about the three who Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Denmark is casting a shadow in a way it has not done before. The international success of Copenhagen’s Lukas Graham is unprecedented. While Aqua, The Ravonettes, Efterklang and Trentemøller are amongst the great Danes who have made international waves musically, Graham has trumped them all to become a surprise world-wide bestseller with the single “7 Years”. Whether or not his brand of streamlined pop appeals – theartsdesk declared that “7 Years’” parent album has a “shiny plasticity that carries no real weight” – it has helped generate interest in the music of Graham’s home country which has Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“7 Years” is one of the biggest hits of 2016, spending five weeks at the top of the UK charts, with plays on streaming sites running into the hundreds of millions. It’s by 27 year old Danish singer-songwriter and former successful child actor Lukas Graham Forchammer and his eponymous band. They have been pop stars in their homeland for half a decade and this album – now boosted with a couple of previous Danish hits – was a chart-topper there last year. The appeal, it seems, is Forchammer’s guileless lyrical honesty, backed with a Clearasil-spotless, squeaky clean stadium pop pitched somewhere Read more ...
David Nice
Brand-new youth operas tend to fall into two types. One is hugely rewarding for the participants, a skill learned and a treasurable group experience to be remembered for the rest of their lives, as well as for their friends and family in the audience. The other, a rarer breed, does all that but also takes a gripping subject transformed by that strange alchemy of operatic setting, stunningly well performed by singers and players alike, and sears everyone who sees it with its special intensity. Nothing fits the latter bill like no other work of its kind I've seen.That's saying Read more ...
peter.quinn
There's a moment in album-opener “Another Weirdo”, just after the one-and-a-half-minute mark, that powerfully captures the dramatic heft and textural surprise of this outstanding big band album. A subdued call and response in the brass snakes its way over an unchanging cadential figure in the bass. And then, from nowhere, a sudden shift up a semitone and the full might of the big band comes crashing in, a blaze of colour over which its composer takes flight.Groove Travels, a celebration of the rhythms that Gerard Presencer has absorbed on his various travels, has been incubating since 2010, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Tobias Lindholm is something of a specialist in exploring the fate of enclosed groups under stress, charting how the dynamics of behaviour between men develop in crisis. I say men, though the Danish director’s name may still be better known in some quarters as a writer on Borgen, the outstanding political series set in another closely defined world where crisis followed crisis, though it's surely the female characters from there who endure more in the memory.Lindholm has obviously kept the loyalty of the Borgen cast, most of all Pilou Asbaek, who played its conflicted spin doctor, Kasper. Read more ...
theartsdesk
Can a portrait really be a portrait if we can’t see a person’s face? And what if the reason we can’t see their face is that it is covered with a lump of dough? Is it a joke? And if it is a joke, is it on us or them? Or perhaps it is a joke about art itself: doughy masks aside, Dahlgaard’s portraits are in every other way conventional, and dough is not so dissimilar to clay, a venerable material in the history of art.As ludicrous as the project undoubtedly is, Danish artist Søren Dahlgaard’s photographs are remarkably effective in their interrogation of portraiture, challenging our Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Tweaked and polished to within an inch of its life, The Danish Girl is the latest shamelessly awards-seeking effort from British director Tom Hooper, whose last two period films The King’s Speech and Les Misérables were certainly showstopping pieces of cinema. Yet, despite the latter’s ostensible grit, both specialised in human anguish prettily presented for your viewing pleasure; Hooper’s unapologetically indulgent, highly embellished approach isn’t to everyone’s taste but you’ve got to admire his bravado.The Danish Girl is based on David Ebershoff’s fictionalised account of the life story Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Is language a barrier to international recognition? Is English necessary to make waves worldwide? Musicians from the African continent and South America regularly perform in their native tongue beyond the borders of their home countries. But often they are – rightly or wrongly – marketed or pigeon-holed as world music, a branding which allows for eschewing the Anglophone. The always problematic label of world music can be and is debated endlessly, but one thing is certain: for Scandinavia, most internationally successful music is delivered in English.Of course, after setting quirky micro- Read more ...