23 February 2024

The Promised Land

Mads Mikkelsen has the kind of sharp, expressive face that “Hollywood deems suitable only for the most acrid of bad guys”, says Guy Lodge in Variety. But in The Promised Land, a “lavish historical romp” set in 18th-century Denmark, he finally gets to be the hero. He plays Ludwig Kahlen, a “stoic” retired military captain who sets out to tame and farm Jutland Heath, a beautiful but “near-barren” expanse of land. Hoping to thwart him – and thus stop him securing his reward of a noble title – is an “irredeemably coal-souled” aristocrat called Frederik De Schinkel (Simon Bjenneberg). The result is a “pleasingly classical duel between pure good and pure evil”. Its bland English-language title really doesn’t do justice to its “yee-haw sense of intrepid adventure” – in the original Danish, it’s called The Bastard.

Critics like to label anything that involves a horse and a patch of grass as a “Western”, says Jonathan Romney in the FT, but The Promised Land really does deserve that description. The landscape is harsh but stunningly beautiful throughout. Kahlen “could be a California frontiersman or a prospector panning for gold in Alaska”; De Schinkel is the equivalent of an evil cattle baron. Mikkelsen is on top form, perfectly capturing his character’s “reckless monomania” and the “fragile unworldliness of a man who has only ever known the army”. And he is “beautifully complemented” by Hagberg Melina, who plays the Romani orphan intent on making Kahlen her surrogate father. It all adds up to a stunning movie, with an “utterly satisfying old-school narrative that Hollywood today would be hard-pressed to muster”.

The Promised Land is out in cinemas now. 
2hrs 7mins (trailer, here). 

Interview with the Vampire

Neil Jordan’s horror-comedy Interview with the Vampire was released 30 years ago, and the “bloodsucking bromance” has stood the test of time, says Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. It kicks off with Louis, a 200-and-something-year-old vampire played by Brad Pitt, divulging his past to a journalist (Christian Slater). We learn that the “squeamish” and idealistic vamp was converted by a more sensualist bloodsucker called Lestat (Tom Cruise), and that they recruited a 12-year-old orphan (Kirsten Dunst) as a sort of daughter, sort of “platonic lover”. The whole thing is a joy. Cruise is “hilarious”, in a comic turn that he has sadly never tried again; Dunst puts in “a performance for the ages”. Three decades on, the “operatic pathos and dapper, jaunty offensiveness are undimmed”.

Interview with the Vampire is on re-release in cinemas now. 
2hrs 3mins (trailer, here.)

Johnnie Burn, the sound designer for Zone of Interest, went to astonishing lengths to recreate the horror of the Holocaust, says The Sunday Times. He spent a year researching the topic, compiling a 600-page dossier based on witness accounts and unpublished documents from Auschwitz’s museum. He then travelled to Paris to capture “the sound of agitated Frenchmen” during the 2022 riots, and recorded the noise at German football games to gather “authentic sounds” of young men aggressively shouting. To create the “rumbling mechanical din” of the crematorium that plays throughout, he put a microphone in his chimney and used cardboard to fan the flames below.