After the Wedding

This is what a Danish soap opera must look like, said Darrell Hartman in The New York Sun. Director Susanne Bier has high artistic ambitions, but her latest film also 'œhas more layers than an entire season' of daytime dramas. Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen) has spent the last 20 years in India, running an orphanage. He returns reluctantly to Denmark to obtain a grant from a mysterious billionaire (Rolf Lassgard), who ends up inviting him to his daughter's wedding. That's when certain long-buried secrets start to materialize, 'œsometimes suddenly and violently, sometimes slowly and laboriously,' said Stephen Whitty in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. Mikkelsen's fascinating as a humanitarian whose self-sacrifice, we slowly realize, also is a form of self-punishment. American audiences who know him only as the villain in Casino Royale are in for a big, and splendid, surprise. Lassgard swaggers as the captain of industry, and Sidse Babett Knudsen glows as his wife, who loved Jacob long ago. Nominated this year for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, After the Wedding is 'œfrankly a melodrama,' said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. But it's made with such an intense psychological acuity that it's able to transcend such labels and 'œflat-out overpower audiences.'

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