In a Better World

Directed by Susanne Bier

(R)

***

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The winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film is both a “richly layered examination of family dynamics” and a “stirring treatise on the nature of violence,” said Michael Rechtshaffen in The Hollywood Reporter. Blending two father-son stories, it introduces us to a Danish physician (Mikael Persbrandt) who is tending to victims of Kenyan warfare while his bullied son back home edges into a dangerous friendship with a boy who’s just lost his mother. But calling this acclaimed work a “crushing bore” might be letting it off easy, said David Edelstein in New York. Trying to prove that retribution is bad, director Susanne Bier has “taken an exploitation premise, slowed it to a crawl, and sprinkled in horrific atrocities” to help make her highly schematized universe seem real. Yet “even at her most heavy-handed, Bier knows how to dig her hooks into you,” said Rene Rodriguez in The Miami Herald. Her latest at least “asks worthwhile questions” about men’s impulse to violence, and “how fathers can best lead their sons.”