Latest news with #HalfdanUllmannTondel
Irish Times
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Four new films to see this week: Pavements, Armand, Superman and Modigliani – Three Days on the Wing of Madness
Pavements ★★★★☆ Directed by Alex Ross Perry. Featuring Pavement, Rebecca Clay Cole, Gary Young, Joe Keery, Nat Wolff, Fred Hechinger, Logan Miller, Griffin Newman, Tim Heidecker. No cert, limited release, 128 min Hybris documentary on Pavement, famously eccentric 1990s indie band, from the director of Listen Up, Philip and Her Smell. The film improbably juggles four separate projects (a documentary, a musical, an art exhibit and a fake biopic) into one shaggy, self-aware, mostly made-up opus. It shouldn't work, yet this overstuffed eclair stays sweet. Perry and editor Robert Greene (using split screens and collage techniques) build a dizzying kaleidoscope of timelines, earnestness and glee. What emerges is a film that's as formally adventurous and oddly affecting as the soundtrack. Will appeal to the band's growing Gen Z following. Full review TB Armand ★★★★☆ Directed by Halfdan Ullmann Tondel. Starring Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Endre Hellestveit, Thea Lambrechts Vaulen, Oystein Roger, Vera Veljovic. No cert, limited release, 117 min The feature debut from Halfdan Ullmann Tondel – grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann – finds an emergency parent-teacher meeting bubbling into an unnerving psychological crucible. Set within the bland, institutional corridors of a Norwegian primary school, the film chronicles a single afternoon that stretches into a surreal purgatory of suspicion, guilt and something like the compellingly demented choreography of Climax, Gaspar Noé's dance horror. Pal Ulvik Rokseth's cinematography adds claustrophobic weight to labyrinthine passages and isolated nooks. This singular film rightly won the Caméra d'Or for best first feature at Cannes film festival in 2024. Full review TB READ MORE Superman ★★☆☆☆ Directed by James Gunn. Starring David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion. 12A cert, gen release, 120 min Boring, cacophonous return to the Superman pool that, not bothering with any origin stories, throws us straight into broadly comic chaos as Hoult's Lex Luthor seeks to take over the world again. Hilarious references to 'punk rock' are misplaced in an enterprise that cost north of $200 million. The cartoonish closing battles make it clear that, not for the first time, Gunn is striving for high trash, but what he achieves here is low garbage. Utterly charmless. Devoid of humanity. As funny as toothache. Corenswet has so little worthwhile dialogue that his lead performance is hard to rate. Full review DC Modigliani: Three Days on the Wing of Madness ★★★☆☆ Directed by Johnny Depp. Starring Riccardo Scamarcio, Antonia Desplat, Bruno Gouery, Ryan McParland, Al Pacino, Stephen Graham, Luisa Ranieri, Sally Phillips, Philippe Smolikowski, Hugo Nicolau. 15A cert, limited release, 108 min Disappointing news for warring factions that hope Depp's study of Amedeo Modigliani turns out to be either masterpiece or dud. Three Days is no great shakes, but it is rarely embarrassing, either. Adapted from a play by Dennis McIntyre, the film goes among Modigliani (Scamarcio, strong) and his pals in an idealised Paris at the height of the first World War. The more it goes on the clearer it becomes that, though Depp no doubt admires Modigliani's work, his real passion here is for the eternally intoxicating fantasy of Parisian bohemia. Fair enough. The glamour remains. Full review DC
Irish Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Armand review: An emergency parent-teacher conference bubbles into an unnerving psychological crucible
Armand Director : Halfdan Ullmann Tondel Cert : None Genre : Drama Starring : Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Endre Hellestveit, Thea Lambrechts Vaulen, Oystein Roger, Vera Veljovic Running Time : 1 hr 57 mins In Armand, the feature debut from Halfdan Ullmann Tondel – grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann – an emergency parent-teacher conference bubbles into an unnerving psychological crucible. It's an improbable hellscape. The film, set within the bland, institutional corridors of a Norwegian primary school, chronicles a single afternoon that stretches into a surreal purgatory of suspicion, guilt and (finally) something like the compellingly demented choreography of Climax, Gaspar Noé's dance horror. Renate Reinsve from The Worst Person in the World , never better than here, plays Elisabeth, a once-celebrated actor and now single mother, summoned to discuss a troubling, possibly sexual playground incident involving Armand, her six-year-old son. She is met not only by Armand's caring, anxious teacher but also by her in-laws, Sarah and Anders, parents of the allegedly assaulted Jon. The meeting quickly devolves into a witch hunt; in a grotesque, climactic scene, Elisabeth bursts into prolonged uncontrollable laughter. READ MORE Such odd and inexplicable behaviours are sandwiched between gutting revelations. Reinsve's alternately steely, fragile performance is met with equal ferocity by Ellen Dorrit Petersen, from The Innocents , playing the heroine's embittered, estranged sister-in-law. A puzzled and ineffectual teaching staff watch on. Pal Ulvik Rokseth's cinematography adds claustrophobic weight to labyrinthine passages and isolated nooks. Loud and performative adult insecurities and inadequacies eclipse any real concern for the children they claim to defend. In this spirit the offending (and accusatory) children remain off-camera. As the meeting splinters into sidebars, whispered menace and stylised interludes dilute the impact of the initial pressure-cooker setting. But even when they demand a bigger leap of faith, Tondel directs these allegorical flourishes with confidence and verve. One scene finds Elisabeth in a two-step with a janitor; another renders a near-biblical judgment at a wordless parental gathering in the pouring rain. These sequences coalesce into an indelible, unsettling debut, one that rightly won the Caméra d'Or for best first feature at Cannes film festival in 2024. In cinemas from Friday, July 11th
Washington Post
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Armand,' a noteworthy debut, dramatizes the school conference from hell
Is 'Armand' getting an international theatrical release solely because Swedish writer-director Halfdan Ullmann Tondel is the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann? On the basis of the movie itself, the answer is … mmmmaybe. Tondel's first feature film (after two earlier shorts) is promisingly weird and provocatively disturbing, but it's made up of disparate stylistic parts that don't always hang together. There's definitely more than nepo-grandbaby gold dust to this debut, which won the Caméra d'Or for best new filmmaker at last year's Cannes, but it may take a few more projects to fully reveal itself.
New York Times
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Armand' Review: When a School Is a Trap
Technically, 'Armand' is not a folk horror movie. Technically, it's not a horror movie at all. But the director Halfdan Ullmann Tondel wants us to wonder what we're in for from the very start. First we see, in claustrophobically panicky close-up shots, a woman blazing down the road in her car. She's speaking urgently on the phone to someone named Armand, asking if he is OK. Something is clearly wrong. Then we're at a school, and the camera glides along the hallways slowly, as if it is a ghost observing the surroundings that we — and she — are about to enter. Ominous music plays. Something bad is lurking. What the bad thing is takes a while to unfold, and no, it's not a monster. (Not exactly.) Instead, 'Armand' is about the way harm, perpetuated across generations, causes communities to turn insular. Outsiders threaten established order, and must be dealt with accordingly. It's this theme that makes the film feel like folk horror. But for most of its running time, 'Armand,' which Tondel also wrote, feels more like a realist drama, the kind in which a school stands in for the whole of society, much like the 2023 film 'The Teacher's Lounge.' Elisabeth (Renate Reinsve), the woman in the car, is the single mother of 6-year-old Armand, who has done a disturbing thing to a classmate. That classmate's parents, Sarah and Anders (Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Endre Hellestveit), are headed to the school as well for a meeting about the situation. The headmaster (Oystein Roger) and the school counselor (Vera Veljovic) have decided to put a junior teacher named Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) in charge of the meeting. She may be in over her head. There's a lot of sitting and talking in classrooms, and a lot of taking breaks so people can go to the bathroom or tend to a nosebleed. The meeting progresses in fits and starts, which is as annoying to the characters as it is to the audience: Just when things get started, the attendees stop, get up, go somewhere. We move in and out of the classroom with them, back and forth through the halls, the place eventually starting to appear like a maze in which every hallway simply leads to some place we feel like we've already been. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
