Bille August’s 1987 award winner is yet another full cinema meal, a deeply satisfying drama about working conditions among Scandinavian immigrants back when being poor was a life sentence. Max von Sydow’s performance is stunning, as an aging stock tender forced to begin again as a veritable serf. He and his good son Pelle are surrounded by little dramas dealing with injustices among the workers and servants, as well as between the landholders in the big farmhouse.
Pelle the Conqueror
Blu-ray
Film Movement Classics
1987 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 150 min. / Pelle erobreren / Street Date May 30, 2017 / 39.95
Starring: Pelle Hvenegaard, Max von Sydow, Erik Paaske, Bjorn Granath, Astrid Villaume, Axel Strobye, Troels Asmussen, Kristina Tornqvist, Karen Wegener, Sofie Grabol, Lars Simonsen, Buster Larsen, John Wittig, Troels Munk, Nis Bank-Mikkelsen.
Cinematography: Jörgen Persson
Film Editor: Janus Billeskov Jansen
Original Music: Stefan Nilsson
Written by Bille August, Per Olov Enquist, Max Lundgren, Bjarne Reuter
from...
Pelle the Conqueror
Blu-ray
Film Movement Classics
1987 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 150 min. / Pelle erobreren / Street Date May 30, 2017 / 39.95
Starring: Pelle Hvenegaard, Max von Sydow, Erik Paaske, Bjorn Granath, Astrid Villaume, Axel Strobye, Troels Asmussen, Kristina Tornqvist, Karen Wegener, Sofie Grabol, Lars Simonsen, Buster Larsen, John Wittig, Troels Munk, Nis Bank-Mikkelsen.
Cinematography: Jörgen Persson
Film Editor: Janus Billeskov Jansen
Original Music: Stefan Nilsson
Written by Bille August, Per Olov Enquist, Max Lundgren, Bjarne Reuter
from...
- 5/16/2017
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Crispin Glover has joined the indie-action thriller "Motel," which already has John Cusack, Robert De Niro and Rebecca Da Costa attached to star. David Grovic will direct the story about a hit man (Cusack) hired by a crime boss (De Niro), who teams up with a mysterious woman to fight off a bunch of baddies in the Delta. Um, okay. Martin Klebba aka the dwarf who punched people in the groin in "Project X" is also on board, and the film is currently shooting. [THR] Sofie Gråbøl (star of the original Danish series "The Killing") and Signe Egholm Olsen will team with Dogme director Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's latest film "The Hour Of The Lynx." Based on an original story by Swedish author Per Olov Enquist, the psych-thriller will follow a vicar who runs an experiment which gives violent, traumatized inmates at an institution the responsibility of caring for animals as pets.
- 7/5/2012
- by Kevin Jagernauth
- The Playlist
The Hour of the Lynx
Original Danish "The Killing" star Sofie Grabol has joined the cast of Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's $3.7 million psychological thriller "The Hour of the Lynx" from "Submarino" scribe Tobias Lindholm. Shooting kicks off late September.
Swedish author Per Olov Enquist penned the original story in which Grabol plays a vicar at a locked institution, helping violent, traumatised inmates by giving them the responsibility for pet animals. [Source: Screen Daily]
Motel
Crispin Glover and Martin Klebba ("Project X") have joined the cast of David Grovic's thriller "Motel" at Red Granite International. John Cusack plays a hitman hired by a famous mob boss (Robert De Niro).
The killer has to fight his way through a cadre of other dangerous people who were also hired by the mobster to convene at a shady motel, and then teams up with a woman to plan his escape. [Source: Heat Vision]
Mother's Day
Sharon Stone has joined the...
Original Danish "The Killing" star Sofie Grabol has joined the cast of Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's $3.7 million psychological thriller "The Hour of the Lynx" from "Submarino" scribe Tobias Lindholm. Shooting kicks off late September.
Swedish author Per Olov Enquist penned the original story in which Grabol plays a vicar at a locked institution, helping violent, traumatised inmates by giving them the responsibility for pet animals. [Source: Screen Daily]
Motel
Crispin Glover and Martin Klebba ("Project X") have joined the cast of David Grovic's thriller "Motel" at Red Granite International. John Cusack plays a hitman hired by a famous mob boss (Robert De Niro).
The killer has to fight his way through a cadre of other dangerous people who were also hired by the mobster to convene at a shady motel, and then teams up with a woman to plan his escape. [Source: Heat Vision]
Mother's Day
Sharon Stone has joined the...
- 7/4/2012
- by Garth Franklin
- Dark Horizons
COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- ''Il Capitano'' is Swedish director Jan Troell's return from years of documentary work to the fact-based fiction that brought him worldwide fame and theatrical distribution in 1971-73 with ''The Emigrants'' and ''The New Land'' (later TV-serialized in the United States as ''The Emigrant Saga''), and Hollywood assignments (''Zandy's Bride, '' 1974, and ''Hurricane, '' 1979).
Troell, with playwright Per Olov Enquist (of Broadway reknown for Strindberg-inspired ''Night of the Tribades, '' 1975), has fashioned a highly personal look at the acts, circumstance and backgrounds of a murder by gun and knife of three utterly innocent victims in a churchyard in Northern Sweden on July 3, 1988.
''Il Capitano'' has brought Cannes and Berlin festival representatives to Stockholm seeking Troell's film as a 1992 competition entry.
There are plenty of good reasons for this, and they herald triumphs for the film on the festival circuit as well as on the art cinema circuit everywhere. An added advantage: the dialog is so sparse, it will require a minimum of subtitling.
Combining edge-of-the-seat suspense with fluid cinematic movement, the film focuses on the two killers, a young vagrant styling himself ''Il Capitano'' and his even younger girlfriend. Through beautiful Northern Swedish landscapes of forests, rivers and villages, the film manages to avoid cheap thrills and gore as well as any hint of finger-pointing and social-psychologizing.
There are flashbacks to explain how the youngsters originally met, he a school dropout from a broken home, she from a culturally refined family. But mostly, Jari and Minna are seen as two individual personalities, drawn to each other by an inner sense of a destiny to be shared.
In one stolen car after another, the couple journey south from their native Finland on a thieving expedition that has hippiedom capital Amsterdam as its rather abstract goal. En route, they pick up rabbits as back-seat pets, drink and make love, stumble upon a shotgun and ammo and kill, without hesitation or remorse, a father, mother and son who unexpectedly confront them in the remote countryside.
The actual killings are seen only in an oblique way, but this adds to rather than subtracts from the suspense at a time when the audience has just settled down to a grudging liking of the two headstrong, yet powerless pawns of fate. Of the murdered family we are told only briefly in a police reconstruction. Throughout, Troell is a master cinematographer as well as director and editor.
''Il Capitano'' is every bit as strong in thriller melodrama values as ''Bonnie & Clyde, '' with which it will inevitably be compared. But the tension of Troell's film is heightened by the subdued way in which it is told rather than through explosions of visually shocking violence.
The shocks may be analyzed by some as a rumble of the volcano of our times.
The playing in the leads by near-amateurs Antti Reini and Maria Heisanen is strongly moving and totally convincing as their young faces reflect alternately hot tempers and soft submission, and as it gets more and more doubtful whether he or she is the real ''capitano'' steering their actions.
The real-life murderers were captured by police on a train passing through Denmark. They were brought to trial and sentenced to life-terms in Sweden. While ''Il Capitano'' was in production, a media debate accused Troell of ''exploitation.'' As the finished film stands, it is the general Swedish consensus that no tragedy could have been told with greater artistic beauty and strength.
IL CAPITANO
Pan Film Sweden, Polyphon Germany
Director-cinematographer-editor Jan Troell
Producer Goran Zetterberg
Screenplay Per Olov Enquist
Music Lars Akerlund, Sebastian Oberg
Color
Starring: Maria Heiskanen, Antti Reini
Running time -- 110 minutes
No MPAA rating
(c) The Hollywood Reporter...
Troell, with playwright Per Olov Enquist (of Broadway reknown for Strindberg-inspired ''Night of the Tribades, '' 1975), has fashioned a highly personal look at the acts, circumstance and backgrounds of a murder by gun and knife of three utterly innocent victims in a churchyard in Northern Sweden on July 3, 1988.
''Il Capitano'' has brought Cannes and Berlin festival representatives to Stockholm seeking Troell's film as a 1992 competition entry.
There are plenty of good reasons for this, and they herald triumphs for the film on the festival circuit as well as on the art cinema circuit everywhere. An added advantage: the dialog is so sparse, it will require a minimum of subtitling.
Combining edge-of-the-seat suspense with fluid cinematic movement, the film focuses on the two killers, a young vagrant styling himself ''Il Capitano'' and his even younger girlfriend. Through beautiful Northern Swedish landscapes of forests, rivers and villages, the film manages to avoid cheap thrills and gore as well as any hint of finger-pointing and social-psychologizing.
There are flashbacks to explain how the youngsters originally met, he a school dropout from a broken home, she from a culturally refined family. But mostly, Jari and Minna are seen as two individual personalities, drawn to each other by an inner sense of a destiny to be shared.
In one stolen car after another, the couple journey south from their native Finland on a thieving expedition that has hippiedom capital Amsterdam as its rather abstract goal. En route, they pick up rabbits as back-seat pets, drink and make love, stumble upon a shotgun and ammo and kill, without hesitation or remorse, a father, mother and son who unexpectedly confront them in the remote countryside.
The actual killings are seen only in an oblique way, but this adds to rather than subtracts from the suspense at a time when the audience has just settled down to a grudging liking of the two headstrong, yet powerless pawns of fate. Of the murdered family we are told only briefly in a police reconstruction. Throughout, Troell is a master cinematographer as well as director and editor.
''Il Capitano'' is every bit as strong in thriller melodrama values as ''Bonnie & Clyde, '' with which it will inevitably be compared. But the tension of Troell's film is heightened by the subdued way in which it is told rather than through explosions of visually shocking violence.
The shocks may be analyzed by some as a rumble of the volcano of our times.
The playing in the leads by near-amateurs Antti Reini and Maria Heisanen is strongly moving and totally convincing as their young faces reflect alternately hot tempers and soft submission, and as it gets more and more doubtful whether he or she is the real ''capitano'' steering their actions.
The real-life murderers were captured by police on a train passing through Denmark. They were brought to trial and sentenced to life-terms in Sweden. While ''Il Capitano'' was in production, a media debate accused Troell of ''exploitation.'' As the finished film stands, it is the general Swedish consensus that no tragedy could have been told with greater artistic beauty and strength.
IL CAPITANO
Pan Film Sweden, Polyphon Germany
Director-cinematographer-editor Jan Troell
Producer Goran Zetterberg
Screenplay Per Olov Enquist
Music Lars Akerlund, Sebastian Oberg
Color
Starring: Maria Heiskanen, Antti Reini
Running time -- 110 minutes
No MPAA rating
(c) The Hollywood Reporter...
- 11/19/1991
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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