Strong and Moving!

Absolutely the worst movie.

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

After enjoying Noi Albino I was excited to see this movie when it popped up at my local art-house cinema.I'm rather bemused by all the positive comments on it as it's really dreadful, a totally nose-dive for the director. Whereas Noi Albino is an impressive slight and tender vision of outsider culture, Dark Horse is a bad scripted and jarring attempt to render the same kind of characters.Primarily the major problems are that the first half is supposed to be funny and isn't, while the second half is supposed to be profound and isn't. The blur between naturalism and style makes it very difficult to engage with the movie. The style on show is accompanied by the prerequsisite "glitzy" style music of mobile phone adverts, shorthand in our culture for ditzy art school cool. The jokes in the first half are strictly of the "here's a man trying to clean a wall, oh look! the water jet spray is strong so he's stumbled backwards variety". There is a barely a genuine laugh in it.To make things worse, the director's vision of life is hopeless limited. The main character ends up giving up messing around with his life in order to have a baby and even ends up wearing a f**king cardigan into the bargain. Talk about black and white. Meanwhile another character wanders around doing absolutely nothing for the entire movie in what appears to be some kind of bourgeous satire. I turned to my girlfriend over an hour and a quarter and asked "who is that guy again?" Not a good sign with a major character.This film is bad on every level. Badly shot, badly scripted, good actors wasted with flimsy characters. Silly worldview. Not funny.It's little wonder that this film disappeared completely for two years before appearing on British cinema screens. It might have been better for the director if it had disappeared altogether. He's got a big whole to climb out of now and a lot to prove in order to confirm that Noi Albino wasn't just a happy mistake...

This movie is about the fortunes and misfortunes of three socially not so well integrated young people and a judge. By following the life of these four characters several features of contemporary life are illuminated. In a funny way during the first half of the movie, more serious in the second.I like Dark Horse very well. It has lots of very different going ons, without becoming boring or hard to follow. Its creators arranged the movie in twelve chapters, probably to avoid confusing the audience with the movies richness. Through this richness of different life episodes, the four main characters are very well explored. In this, the movie has a positive attitude to live without being sentimental or uncritical.In spite of the first part of Dark Horse taking a humorous look at the three young people, it never ridicules them. The change from the funny part to the serious one is short and fluid. Despite changing its tone this way, the movie remains coherent. The second part hasn't many lines for its protagonists to speak. Nonetheless, mostly by images, the judge, introduced in this part, is well explored.All in all a movie deserving it to be seen by a large audience.

I never did get around to seeing Dagur Kári's first film, Nói albínói, but now that I've seen his second, I'll make it a priority. Dark Horse (as it was called at AFI Fest in Los Angeles) is a very funny, stylish, and genuinely touching comedy in the vein of Jim Jarmusch's early films, albeit livelier and less adamantly cerebral. Daniel (Jakob Cedergren) is a graffiti artist who probably embodies the term loser more fully than anyone you have ever met. He's broke, lazy, irresponsible and dorky. This is a comedy, though, and appropriately, Daniel is a lovable loser. Morfar (Nicolas Bro) is Daniel's only apparent friend, an overweight dude who works in a sleep clinic and maintains aspirations of becoming a soccer referee. The story gets underway when these two guys visit a bakery and the beautiful woman behind the counter (Tilly Scott Pederson) spontaneously declares her love for Morfar, who is so taken aback by her expression that he runs away. Immediately after, Daniel discovers that this chick is tripping on psychedelic mushrooms, casting some doubt on her romantic declaration, and he aids her in getting home. So begins a loser's love triangle which by the end of the film has very gracefully become about something else: the possibility of elusive, fundamental personal change, both for the better and for the worse.Every member of this cast, down to the most peripheral supporting role, is terrific. The two leading men, in particular, are understated and yet deeply human. Kári's sense of the visual and the aural (he clearly cares a lot about sound) is very hip but always elegant. He shoots quirky angles in high contrast back-and-white, but every shot is about something; even his flourishes have purpose. Most importantly, the script by Kári and his co-writer, Rune Schjøtt, gracefully treads that very risky territory between the offbeat and the naturalistic. His characters move through their lives whimsically and even the narrative structure seems vaguely improvised, yet there is a graceful evolution to the unfolding of events that, by the end, gives the classic sense of inevitability that we associate with the best film writing. (It speaks volumes, I think, that the English subtitles were sometimes impossible to read because of the stark white areas in the frame, and yet I never felt that I missed a beat).I don't see a U.S. release date indicated on the IMDb, but I can't imagine that Dark Horse (or whatever they're going to call it) won't ultimately find a distributor. This is that rare breed of crowd-pleasing art flick that any half-astute specialty studio should be fighting over.

This is a welcome renewal of the Danish cinema! Kári is telling a traditional story of finding yourself in life, but in an untraditional way. First of all, it's in beautiful black & white, which really suits it. Second, he's not afraid of throwing the viewer off course by the characters' unexpected reactions to everyday events, their ignorance, naivety and way of tackling what life gives them.It's funny, has fresh new talent (Tilly Scott Pedersen) and some oldies that does their job really well. At certain points in the movie the pace slows down and I felt the director didn't really know where to take the movie, and ends up with some unfinished stories - but then again it's maybe just one of those "figure it out yourself" stories. I really liked 'Voksne mennesker' and look forward to see more from Dagur Kári!