Self-important film that presumes it has something pertinent to say about the human condition but doesn't.
Comment
02/03/08
Flanders (2006)
71 %
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted: 52
Fresh: 37
Rotten:15
Average Rating: 6.2/10
Consensus: Though Bruno Dumont recycles his typical themes and motifs, Flanders is also just as beautifully shot and convincingly acted as the director’s previous movies.
Runtime: 1 hr 31 mins
Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release: May 18, 2007 Limited
Synopsis: Flanders. Demester shares his time between his farm and walks with Barbe, his childhood friend. He loves her, secretly and painfully, accepting from her the little that she can give him. Along with others his age, Demester leaves to be a... [More]
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Reviews for Flanders
Enough is left vague that an abstract quality is achieved, and the effect is one of amplification of the themes running throughout the film.
01/07/08
Dumont is much more confident when he sticks to the title town and the young woman the men left behind; his habit of alternating close shots with extreme long shots and his singularly unsentimental way of showing sex are as distinctive as ever.
01/03/08
Top Critic This film has few tangible pleasures, such as some somber shots of Demester walking far away in a field. Its achievement is theoretical.
08/17/07
Top Critic The harsh and lovely achievement of Bruno Dumont's Flanders is its mixture of the concrete and the abstract. It isn't about a specific war. It's about conflict of every stripe, in any time.
08/16/07
Top Critic Dumont's gift for dramatic expression of physical space and sensuously conceived landscape is undeniable. If only he had attached a coherent story to his vividly evoked sense of surroundings.
08/04/07
Anything but comforting. With its depiction of bestial behavior and shocking wartime violence, it's the kind of film that polarizes viewers through the raw power of its imagery.
08/03/07
It's more provocative than realistic and his naturalism is contained in an arch structure, but his directness is affecting ...
08/02/07
French filmmaker Bruno Dumont urges his audience to delve beneath the movie's melodramatic, often graphic surface and experience the film sensorially rather than intellectually.
07/26/07
Top Critic This is not a film of youth or wisdom -- it's not even a film of real intelligence. And so we flit between war and relative peace, with no insight or feeling or compelling style.
07/20/07
Top Critic Among his other deficiencies, Dumont is ... utterly humorless. ... Flanders will leave you nostalgic for the wacky hijinx of films like Persona and The Passion of the Christ.
07/15/07
Dumont effectively conjures between the dreary routine of everyday life and the normalised horrors of this nameless conflict.
07/14/07
Flanders is relentlessly bleak, but as it works its way into your bloodstream, the aftertaste is somewhat akin to relief...For those who allow it, Flanders offers the comfort of recognition, and acceptance, of what it means to be human.
07/10/07
His camera, whether focused upon acts of horrific brutality or humdrum routine, maintains a steady, unflinching gaze. This, it seems to say, is life and death and nothing else.
07/06/07
Top Critic Brutal, in-your-face and frequently gory it’s challenging viewing but definitely more for the kind of people who prefer art house cinemas to multiplexes.
07/06/07
Top Critic In the gutter, looking at something or other, but definitely not the stars.
07/06/07
Top Critic The dour message it delivers doesn’t so much suggest that war is hell, but that existence certainly is.
07/06/07
Top CriticLatest News for Flanders
November 14, 2007:
Sexual sneak peak at low IQ characters. 
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May 17, 2007:
Critical Consensus: Third Time's Not the Charm for "Shrek"
America is going green this week: "Shrek the Third" (featuring the voices of Mike Meyers, Eddie Murphy, and Antonio Banderas) is our single new wide release. Critics... More...
Related Forums for Flanders
(2007 USA release)-Bruno Dumont's FLANDERS skedded to OPEN in NYC on May 18th!!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 6/7/07
by: REEL_REVIEWER 6/7/07
(2007 USA release)-Bruno Dumont's FLANDERS skedded to OPEN in NYC on May 18th!!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 6/7/07
by: REEL_REVIEWER 6/7/07
(2007 USA release)-Bruno Dumont's FLANDERS skedded to OPEN in NYC on May 18th!!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 6/7/07
by: REEL_REVIEWER 6/7/07
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