Aksel Hennie

The Doorman

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Ruby Rose

There are good things and bad things in The Doorman, a Die Hard retread that hands the Bruce Willis role to Ruby Rose, the onetime model and TV presenter who made her name in Orange Is the New Black and has played Batwoman with some aplomb in TV shows Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow and, unsurprisingly, Batwoman. She is one of the good things. The character she plays a bit less so. In a pre-credits sequence we see Rose’s Sergeant Ali trying and failing to protect an American diplomat and her daughter while on active duty in Romania. Both mother and daughter die in an armed ambush and Ali is traumatised as a result. … Read more

Sisu

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Aatami, smeared in dirt

Sisu is the return to form that Finnish director Jalmari Helander’s fans were hoping for. If he’d died after his feature debut, 2010’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, he could have shuffled off to Tuonela knowing he’d made a funny, grisly Christmas movie like no other. But he followed up with Big Game, an attempt to weld Helander’s dark ethos to something more obviously Hollywood (it starred Samuel L Jackson), which not only didn’t quite satisfy either camp but also diluted the Rare Exports story a touch. TV work followed and now Sisu, a dark, bloodlusty, periodically howlingly funny film that reverses Helander out of that corner. First Blood is the inspiration, Helander … Read more

Headhunters

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Aksel Hennie and Synnøve Macody Lund in Headhunters

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 October Norway becomes independent, 1905 On this day in 1905, Norway became independent from Sweden. An independent country during the Viking and post-Viking era, Norway’s power declined after 1265, with the Black Death and competition from the North European trading and economic union the Hanseatic League forcing it out of its eminent position. In 1380 it was absorbed into a union with Denmark which stayed in place for four centuries (the country was formally dissolved in 1536, then re-established in 1660, though it continued to recognise itself as being Norwegian, and had standalone institutions and laws). Remarkably, this union was … Read more