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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
A soul also lurks underneath the shocks. When the director turns the most overused three-word phrase into a devastating reinstatement of humanity, you’re quickly reminded of why [director] Dumont was so lauded in the first place.
Why would anyone want to spend time with these characters in the first place?
Dumont's ideas and insights have narrowed with this picture, his relaxed pacing now lethargic, his physically and mentally thick characters too familiar, and his ice-water shocks a bit predictable. It would seem self-parodic if it weren't so damn tragic.
Whether you like or loathe Mr. Dumont’s movies, his unsettling vision of humanity stripped of cultural finery feels profoundly truthful. Beneath the facade of civilization, life is a barnyard.
Top CriticA dud with zero Milk Dud appeal.
In the end, the only nagging flaw with Flanders is that [director] Dumont has more or less made this movie three times before.
[Director Dumont's] got a decent way of moving figures toward the vanishing point of a landscape. Otherwise, ugh.
I wish I could say that I liked Flanders, but it is almost as if Dumont has a checklist of what to include in his movies. For me, this film was more of the same.
The idea of "home" as the root of all our desires exists in counterpoint to the war scenes, and Flanders seems to wonder about those desires.
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.
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.
Stupid, sexy Flanders!
A somber, beautifully acted reflection on the barbarity of war and the bestiality of man, which only enormous compassion can redeem.
Pretentious to the core and lacking any context or credible characterizations, Flanders juxtaposes bucolic scenes of life in a farm community, featuring a clutch of dim-witted rustics, with scenes of utter barbarity in an unspecified war.
Top Critic
November 14, 2007:
Sexual sneak peak at low IQ characters. 
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