Thomas Bo Larsen Archives | Deep Focus Review Movie Reviews, Essays, and Analysis Sat, 12 Jul 2025 14:56:44 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.2 https://www.deepfocusreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/cropped-DFR-Favicon-5-32x32.png Thomas Bo Larsen Archives | Deep Focus Review 32 32 Another Round https://www.deepfocusreview.com/reviews/another-round/ https://www.deepfocusreview.com/reviews/another-round/#respond Sat, 12 Jul 2025 14:56:24 +0000 https://www.deepfocusreview.com/?post_type=reviews&p=29174 Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round dances on the ledge between tragedy and comedy, chaos and clarity. The Danish filmmaker fortifies his 2020 release, winner of the Oscar for Best International Feature and many other awards, not only with a superb ensemble cast headlined by Mads Mikkelsen’s outstanding performance, but also with a balance of puckish energy and philosophical depth. He opens the film with a quote from Kierkegaard: “What is youth? A dream. What is love? The content of the dream.” Vinterberg frames youth as a fleeting time of passion that becomes muted as one grows older. From there, he thoughtfully explores the midlife crises among men who run an impulsive experiment involving alcohol—a somewhat ill-advised attempt to recapture the dream of youth and renew their dispirited lives. Their reckless revival efforts put their careers and personal lives at risk for an experiment that awakens some and sends others further into a downward spiral. Just like the characters, the film, too, alternates between high and low, playful and sobering, pickled and profound.    The full review is currently exclusive to Patreon subscribers. To read it, you can purchase individual access. Or you can join Deep Focus Review’s Patron community, where you’ll receive […]

The post Another Round appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

]]> https://www.deepfocusreview.com/reviews/another-round/feed/ 0 The Celebration https://www.deepfocusreview.com/definitives/the-celebration/ https://www.deepfocusreview.com/definitives/the-celebration/#respond Sat, 18 Sep 2021 23:04:20 +0000 https://www.deepfocusreview.com/?post_type=definitives&p=19731 In The Celebration (Festen), the camera explores and invades personal spaces like someone shooting a home movie at a birthday party. The 1998 film was among the earliest to use a handheld digital video camera, and the stimulating effect exposes ugly truths about its characters. The technical choice was informed by practical and artistic disciplines passed down from Dogme 95, an experiment by Danish provocateurs who questioned conventional forms of cinema, narrative tropes, and compositional norms. Under the film’s Dogme 95 banner (its official title is Dogme #1: Festen), it remains inextricably linked to the movement and its strictures, which provided the uncredited director, Thomas Vinterberg, with the boundaries within which he devised and completed the production. The result strips away artifice in both technique and content, reflecting Dogme 95 principles better than any other because its narrative presents an apt analogy to the movement’s views. Vinterberg’s alignment of narrative and the form prescribed by Dogme 95 creates an intellectually satisfying organization of visual and thematic contexts. But the film endures beyond its significance in film history and experimental cinema. Its portrait of paternalism, the fallacy of benign patriarchal entitlement, Danish racism, and the taboos of incest and pedophilia strike […]

The post The Celebration appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

]]> https://www.deepfocusreview.com/definitives/the-celebration/feed/ 0