Flammen & Citronen (Flame & Citron) (The Flame and the Lemon) Reviews
Top Critic
Madsen has acknowledged a strong debt to Pierre Melville's 1969 classic Army of Shadows. This one deserves a seat at the same table.
It's fast-paced, stylish and thrilling. But it also raises one tough question.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It winds its way through a tricky, fact-based plot that's sometimes reminiscent of film noir. At the center is a bewitching femme fatale whose allegiances and motives are less than clear.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Madsen makes the most of his budget, and he keeps pulling his camera back for long, visually sumptuous overhead shots.
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| Original Score: 3/4
To its credit, the film gives full weight to the confusion and ambivalence of war; the struggle for liberation from tyranny rarely looks so dubious.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Flame & Citron examines the moral shadings of the Danish resistance during World War II without turning into a revisionist bore.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Maintains a high level of suspense for more than two hours.
Flame & Citron, based on the lives of two actual Resistance heroes, is a taut, handsome production -- the most expensive Danish film to date -- and it looks like a film noir, as indeed the costumes, cars, guns and fugitives force it to.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A deeply involving look at people living permanently on the knife-edge of danger.
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| Original Score: 4/5
A satisfying thriller interestingly complicated by its study of character and compromise.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The action scenes are well-staged and the performances are aces.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
As directed by Ole Christian Madsen, the thriller features well-choreographed shootouts and assassinations. But the script is too melodramatic and complicated for its own good.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The director Ole Christian Madsen's Flame & Citron is a fictionalized film, based on fact, about two Danish Resistance fighters.
| Original Score: 4/5
The film is based on true events: Flame and Citron (both noms de guerre) became national heroes. But it's really a meditation on the nature of heroism, and the quest for purity of purpose.
It's hard to argue with such primal filmgoing pleasures, especially once the film introduces notions of how good people lose their morality during wartime.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Of all European nations, Denmark enjoys the nearest thing to a heroic record of resisting the Nazi occupiers -- which adds both poignancy and punch to Ole Christian Madsen's fact-based drama about two posthumously honored Danes.
You can feel the shadow of Steven Spielberg's Munich hovering over Flame & Citron, a Danish drama of resistance fighters in Copenhagen during WWII.
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| Original Score: B
A bold, riveting tale of wartime resistance borrowing the form of a noir thriller.
It's episodic and lengthy, but on the whole this is a well-sustained and surprisingly understated drama.
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| Original Score: 3/6
