In the end, the only nagging flaw with Flanders is that [director] Dumont has more or less made this movie three times before.
Comment
05/17/07
Flanders (2006)
69
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:54
Fresh:37
Rotten:17
Average Rating:6.1/10
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.
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... [More]
Starring: Samuel Boidin, Adelaide Leroux, Henri Cretel, Jean-Marie Bruveart
Director: Bruno Dumont
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Reviews for Flanders
Memorably compassionate.
07/06/07
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 CriticA troubling war film that combines extraordinary, minimalist battle scenes with emotional meltdown at home. Grim, but compelling.
07/06/07
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 CriticThis 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 CriticThe 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 CriticA congealed shrug
08/27/09
An unpleasant exercise about the pointless, dehumanization of war, as well as the pointlessness of sex and perhaps even the pointlessness of existence itself.
06/22/07
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
In the gutter, looking at something or other, but definitely not the stars.
07/06/07
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
Dumont (L'humanité, Twentynine Palms) mounts the brutish combat sequences with undeniable small-scale skill, though his constant see-sawing between images of sex and death verges on the masturbatory.
07/06/07
Harrowing and complex, this study in terror is not for the faint of heart.
07/06/07
For its depiction of (very) simple country folk coping with war, Flandres has some of the force that’s been missing from Dumont’s work since La Vie de Jésus.
09/23/06
You come out of it gob-smacked, and moved in ways which film rarely does these days.
05/21/07
Once you've connected to its off-beat vibe, the result is a memorable and highly original experience.
05/27/07
A dud with zero Milk Dud appeal.
05/17/07
The opening scenes of hardscrabble farms in Northern France present an utterly bleak existence. It's not surprising, then, that the villages' men don't bat an eye when they are called to fight in a brutal North African conflict.
09/23/06
Like Dumont's best work, it echoes uneasily in the mind.
07/06/07
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