Triangle of Sadness (2022)

We meet a male model and his model girlfriend having dinner at a swanky restaurant and an argument starts between them over paying the bill; from there this dry comedy moves aboard a ship offering cruises to the rich and famous and hell breaks loose there, too, offering more sharp commentary about privilege and control in a modern world of poor freeloaders, rich hoarders, those in service and those who wantonly wield power.

★★★★☆

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Midsommar (2019)

That the American tourists, magic mushroom tea-chugging stoners on a lark in Europe, suddenly sober and become earnest anthropologists fighting over the chance to write a thesis about the loony Wicker Man community they have come across in Sweden is a subplot going to a lot of trouble to justify why the group doesn't hightail it out of that lurid Teletubbie land at the first sight of a grizzly head hammering, in Ari Aster's again unrestrained short film idea-turned-into-a-near-three-hour horror slog that plays out, well, imagine the wicker totem being wheeled out at the twenty-minute mark and Edward Woodward suffering twisted rituals one-after-the-other for the final two hours - skinnings and sex rites and cliff dives and death ceremonies and bear disembowelments and pube pies and til-you-drop maypole dances - a convoluted and depraved mess which the stoners should be glad not to have to intellectualise in a thesis given it all seems to boil down to the minor question of whether one smiles through it or not.

★★★☆☆

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Border (Gräns) (2018)

There are lots of borders-between-things straddled by this Swedish movie - challenges to binary perspectives - and one of them is the line between it being completely ridiculous and not, and somehow the story of Tina, a border security guard who excels at her job because she can smell vice, always steers itself back from that brink; the movie, in which misfit Tina at last meets a kindred spirit and learns more about her true nature, is fascinating, challenging, emotional, beautiful, staggeringly original, and right the way through teeters on being - but never ends up being - utterly ridiculous.

★★★★☆

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The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden) (2009)

Released in the same year, 2009, as Dragon Tattoo, this sequel in fact takes up the story one full year later, so was released in shorter time than the story - but that is still so short a time, Played With Fire feels like just the second half of one looong movie - with this part filling in some of the details surrounding Salander's, er, particular way of being (ruthless, traumatised goth fighting machine) while she computer-hacks and investigates and becomes the prime suspect in another mystery, this time involving sex trafficking, which she investigates in unison with - but again physically distanced from - her journalist friend (Michael Nyqvist as Blomkvist) and it ends up being more "James Bond" than the first movie's Agatha Christie-style 40-year-old murder-mystery-in-a-mansion - there's even a hulking Jaws character impervious to pain!

★★★☆☆

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The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor) (2009)

I came very late to these adaptations of the Stieg Larsson books - was I on another planet? - but have, in 2021,  finally watched the Swedish movie series and can say they are gripping, often brutal action mysteries, this first one introducing Noomi Rapace as the kickass title heroine who investigates a 40-year-old murder mystery, one of those plots that require a fair suspension of your disbelief as details from all those decades ago present themselves to the hacker-slash-investigator impossibly conveniently, untouched and intact in the modern day.

★★★★☆

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In Order Of Disappearance (Kraftidioten) (2014)

The 2018 American remake of this darkly funny Scandinavian Harry Brown seemed to think the interest lay in the irreverent detail - the gangster nicknames, the odd bod characters, and the quirky relationships - and so ended up an unfocused Fargo mess while the 2014 Norwegian original includes all the irreverent detail but remains tightly focused on how the actions of a revenge-seeking everyman (in fact, a small-town Citizen of the Year), um, snowball and erupt a war between rival drug gangs, all while the everyman miraculously dodges bullets.

★★★☆☆

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The Square (2017)

It's about things (landscape paintings or bags or people or an ape or social issues) looked at outside of their usual contextual frames, which might explain a handful of the more bewildering scenes lacking context or consequence (like an apartment ape, a disappearing sexual conquest, and a dramatic arthouse dinner that occurs suddenly and spontaneously and ends without follow-up) but whether bewildering or hilarious, terrifying, shocking or absurd, The Square is always interesting and raises food for thought about issues both on a personal and international front: the refugee crisis, the widening divide between the haves and have-nots, the tendency for individuals to lower their gazes and bow their heads to shirk responsibility, and insane codes of behaviour dictated by arbitrary lines on the ground (wild thrashing about in a nightclub or on a mattress or on a stage set out for cheerleading acrobatics)...or it could all just be a very longwinded reiteration/justification of a 2014 art project by director Ruben Östlund and producer Kalle Boman.

★★★★☆

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Force Majeure (2014)

The environment - spectacular mountains and snow - crashes and booms and provides the impetus for drama at the start of this clever Swedish movie then settles into a muted, still backdrop against which a husband and wife - padded, helmetted, isolated from the world and each other - experience the fallout of his self-interest during an avalanche - a story as crisp as mountain air, hilarious, thought-provoking, and utterly mortifying to watch.

★★★★☆

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Melancholia (2011)

Stultifying in its attempts at sumptuousness and profundity, particularly in its first half, Melancholia, a melodrama about the world's least fun wedding played out as a planet heads on a collision course with Earth, is nonetheless so stunningly photographed, so well-acted by Kirsten Dunst, and so curious a work that it manages to overcome its many failings to be, well, watchable.

★★☆☆☆

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