Maria Bonnevie Archives | Deep Focus Review

Another Round

Brian Eggert — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 14:56:24 +0000

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 […]

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The Banishment

David Hill — Sun, 08 Nov 2020 15:35:40 +0000

Expectations were high on Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s sophomore feature The Banishment after the success of his Golden Lion-winning debut, The Return. Unfortunately, these expectations were not quite met. The film received a lukewarm reaction after its premiere in the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival in 2007, and it is generally considered the director’s weakest film by critics. However, while The Banishment does indeed not reach the heights of Zvyagintsev’s best work, it would be unfair to dismiss the film as it still contains several aspects that deserve to be praised. With The Banishment, Zvyagintsev once again tells an elusive story about a doomed family. The family in question consists of father Mark (Konstantin Lavronenko, who also played the father in The Return), mother Vera (Maria Bonnevie, a Swedish-Norwegian actress who was redubbed by Russian actress Elena Lyadova), and their two children, Kir (Maksim Shibayev) and Eva (Katya Kulkina). Mark and Vera are already estranged when the film begins, but things only get worse on a family trip to Mark’s rural childhood home when Vera confesses to Mark that she is pregnant, and that Mark is not the father of the unborn child. Mark, with the help of […]

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