Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg, 2020)

Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang, Lars Ranthe, Maria Bonnevie, Helene Reingaard Neumann, Susse Wold, Magnus Sjørup, Silas Cornelius Van, Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt. Screenplay: Thomas Vinterberg, Tobias Lindholm. Cinematography: Sturla Brandt Grøvlen. Production design: Sabine Viid. Film editing: Janus Billeskov Jansen, Anne Østerud. 

At Eternity's Gate (Julian Schnabel, 2018)

Willem Dafoe in At Eternity's Gate

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Oscar Isaac, Mads Mikkelsen, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Niels Arestrup. Screenplay: Jean-Claude Carrière, Julian Schnabel, Louise Kugelberg. Cineatography: Benoît Delhomme. Production design: Stéphane Cressend. Film editing: Louise Kugelberg, Julian Schnabel. Music: Tatiana Lisovskaya. 

Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate is less a dramatic biopic than a series of conversations about art and madness centered on the figure of Vincent van Gogh. Willem Dafoe got yet another well-deserved Oscar nomination for playing van Gogh as a man who walks the line between genius and psychosis. Schnabel's contribution to this familiar story is to introduce a recent theory that van Gogh's death was not a suicide but instead a mishap, the result of a random gunshot when the artist was being harassed by a couple of young hoodlums. Van Gogh, in this theory, claimed he shot himself perhaps to protect the perpetrators but also as a kind of acknowledgement that he had reached a terminal point in his life. But what matters most in the film is art, explored in conversations between Vincent and his brother, Theo (Rupert Friend), his fellow artist Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac), and near the end of the film with a priest, played by Mads Mikkelsen. It's an often fascinating film in its re-creation of 19th-century Paris, Arles, and Auvers-sur-Oise, and its deft matching of scenery and people with the corresponding places and faces familiar to us from van Gogh's paintings. To my mind, cinematographer Benoît Delhomme overuses the hand-held camera to the point of inducing a kind of nausea, but perhaps the intent was to suggest the instability that van Gogh tried to turn into fixity by painting it.

Rogue One (Gareth Edwards, 2016)

Felicity Jones and Diego Luna in Rogue One

Jyn Erso: Felicity Jones
Cassian Andor: Diego Luna
Galen Erso: Mads Mikkelsen
Saw Gerrera: Forest Whitaker
Bodhi Rook: Riz Ahmed
K-2SO: Alan Tudyk (voice)
Chirrut Îmwe: Donnie Yen
Baze Malbus: Wen Jiang
Orson Krennic: Ben Mendelsohn
Governor Tarkin: Guy Henry
Bail Organa: Jimmy Smits

Director: Gareth Edwards
Screenplay: Chris Weitz, Tony Gilroy, John Knoll, Gary Whitta
Cinematography: Greig Fraser
Production design: Doug Chiang, Neil Lamont
Music: Michael Giacchino

It takes a lot of work (and money) to sustain a myth. Rogue One, the first of the standalone (i.e., not an official Star Wars episode) films based on George Lucas's corpus of myth about a galaxy far away and a long time ago, doesn't really stand alone. It's there to plug a hole in the larger Star Wars narrative: How could the Empire have been so careless as to leave a critical vulnerability in the Death Star, so that Luke Skywalker could take advantage of it as easily as he used to bullseye womp rats in his T-16? It was, of course, an inside job, a bit of sabotage by an engineer named Galen Erso. So what we have in Rogue One is essentially Star Wars: Episode 3.5. I've got no problem with that, except that it hardly seems worth two hours and 13 minutes or $200 million to fill a plot gap. It also feels like a waste of a splendidly capable cast to create vivid and heroic characters only to kill them all off by the end of the movie. Or to reanimate (literally) an actor who died in 1994 to give the illusion of continuity between films: If we can accept that James Bond can be played by many actors, or that the entire crew of the Starship Enterprise can be "rebooted" for a new series of Star Trek films, why shouldn't we accept that someone other than Peter Cushing could play Grand Moff (here he's just a general) Tarkin? There's something macabre about superimposing a dead man's face on a live actor's, and I hope Guy Henry got paid well for playing Tarkin from the neck down. These objections aside, Rogue One is a well-played war movie, with just enough resemblance to real wars to make it somewhat unsettling: The scenes in the capital of Jedha have an eerie similarity to recent news footage coming out of cities in Syria and Iraq, and the combat in tropical Scarif evokes any number of war movies set in Vietnam or in the South Pacific during World War II. In fact, Rogue One may be the most visceral and depressing film in the Star Wars canon.

Watched on Netflix

A Royal Affair (Nikolaj Arcel, 2012)

Mads Mikkelsen and Alicia Vikander in A Royal Affair

Caroline Mathilde: Alicia Vikander
Johann Friedrich Struensee: Mads Mikkelsen
Christian VII: Mikkel Boe Følsgaard
Juliane Marie: Trine Dyrholm
Ove Høegh-Guldberg: David Dencik
Augusta, Princess of Wales: Harriet Walter

Director: Nikolaj Arcel
Screenplay: Rasmus Heisterberg, Nikolaj Arcel
Based on a novel by Bodil Steensen-Leth
Cinematography: Rasmus Videbæk
Production design: Niels Sejer
Costume design: Manon Rasmussen

A Royal Affair features a Swedish actress, Alicia Vikander, and a Danish actor, Mads Mikkelsen, who are already well known in the United States, but they almost get the film stolen out from under them by Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, a young Danish actor unknown on this side of the Atlantic. The film, as its title suggests, is a romantic historical drama. It's based on the story of the arranged marriage of Princess Caroline Matilda of Great Britain (a sister of George III) to King Christian VII of Denmark, and her affair with the king's adviser, the German physician Johann Friedrich Struensee, a story that, as the film is careful to point out, is an analog to the story of Guinevere, Lancelot, and Arthur. It's a rough analog, because unlike Arthur, Christian (Følsgaard), was quite mad. And except for cuckolding the king, Struensee (Mikkelsen) is really more Merlin than Lancelot to him -- a physician who tries to temper Christian's madness but also a political adviser determined to bring the ideas of Locke and Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers to feudal, priest-ridden Denmark. Director Nikolaj Arcel and co-screenwriter Rasmus Heisterberg naturally gravitate more toward the romance than the politics, using as their primary source a novel by Bodil Steensen-Leth that tells the story from the point of view of Caroline, who is as disgusted with her mad husband as he is indifferent to her. Vikander is splendid in the role as she goes from naive enthusiasm at the idea of marrying a king, even though she's never seen him before they're wed, to icy disillusionment and from indifference to Struensee to passion. Mikkelsen is a little stolid in his role: He communicates Struensee's passion for Enlightenment ideas better than he does his passion for Caroline. But Følsgaard has a grand time playing the mercurial Christian, who is sometimes plausibly sane and even likable, but mostly acts like a four-year-old in a grown man's body, with the additional danger of having the royal prerogative to do what he wants. Arcel does a good job of rising above the clichés of the genre, and cinematographer Rasmus Videbæk and production designer Niels Sejer do justice to the handsome settings, most of them in and around Prague.

The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

Thomas Vinterberg and his co-screenwriter, Tobias Lindholm, load so much misery on the protagonist of The Hunt that they find themselves in a bind: How do you resolve a plot that inflicts so much suffering on an innocent man without resorting to either a saccharine happy ending or a depressingly cataclysmic one? When Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen), a man in his 40s who teaches in the kindergarten of a small Danish village, is accused by one of the children of exposing himself to her, his life goes to hell. He loses his job and his friends, including his girlfriend, and ruins his chances of a more favorable custody agreement with his ex-wife. And even after the authorities find that there is no evidence to substantiate the little girl's charge, he is still harassed by his neighbors and even denied service at the local grocery store. It's a superb part for Mikkelsen, whose death's-head cheekbones naturally made him the right choice as the most recent incarnation of Hannibal Lecter on TV's Hannibal, but who proves in this film that he can play a sympathetic victim as well as a psychotic villain. But the film depends equally on the performances of Susse Wold as Grethe, the principal of the kindergarten; Thomas Bo Larsen as Theo, the father of the little girl; Lasse Fogelstrøm as Lucas's teenage son, Marcus; and especially the very young Annika Wedderkopp as Klara, Lucas's accuser. The suspicions directed at Lucas gain credibility from the fact that he's an anomaly in the somewhat macho culture of the village: Well into middle age, he is the only male teacher in the kindergarten -- it was apparently the only available teaching job after the school he once taught at closed. Klara is drawn to him as a kind of father figure: Her parents spend much time fighting with each other. Somewhat withdrawn, she has a childish ritual of never stepping on the lines in the sidewalk, and she gets lost because she looks at her feet and not where she's going. Lucas finds her one day and gets her home safely, and promises her that she can come to his house and play with his dog, Fanny. But Klara develops a kind of crush on Lucas, and when she gives him a present and tries to kiss him on the lips, he is forced to establish some limits. Hurt by the rejection, Klara tells the principal that she doesn't like Lucas because he's a man and has a penis. The principal unfortunately takes her remark too seriously and pursues the matter, whereupon Klara remembers a pornographic image that her older brother had shown her on his phone and describes it as if it were Lucas's penis. The principal's amateurish investigation feeds parental hysteria which ultimately results in other children coming forward to accuse Lucas. The film recalls the widespread incidents of sexual abuse accusations that took place particularly in the 1980s, as in the notorious McMartin preschool case in Los Angeles. Fortunately, Vinterberg and Lindholm keep the larger issues in the background as they concentrate on its effect on Lucas, his family, and his friends. The end of the film is, however, something of a muddle: Lucas's life has returned to normal, as far as we can see, as he celebrates Marcus's coming of age by letting the boy join a deer hunt. Only in the concluding sequence do we get a suggestion that the incident will never be fully resolved.