‘The Promised Land’ Review: Mads Mikkelsen At His Staunch, Heroic Best In Nikolaj Arcel’s Classic Drama About Human Frailty – Venice Film Festival

When it comes to booking a relaxing getaway, nothing can beat a seaside cottage in Scotland.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The Zurich Film Festival, which runs Sept. 28 – Oct.

Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen will be honored with the Zurich Film Festival’s Golden Eye Award for career achievement at the fest’s upcoming 19th edition.

A mysterious island with a fascinating past lies less than an hour from the centre of Manchester.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of Content When first-time documentary director Leonard Manzella premieres his award-winning “Shoe Shine Caddie” at the Portobello Film Festival in London on September 16, it will represent a kind of return to the former actor’s roots in the international film scene. A professional family therapist for the past 30 years in California, Manzella’s earlier career began when the native Angeleno left Los Angeles for Rome in 1968 “when everything was burning.” In his early 20s and armed with “no contacts and about $50 bucks in my pocket,” a fortuitous introduction to American actor Brett Halsey got Manzella into movies, first as an extra and eventually as a leading man.

Elysian Film Group, Anonymous Content, and Bleecker Street have jointly acquired UK rights to The Boy and the Heron, the latest feature from celebrated Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki.

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Mads Mikkelsen had a slightly heated exchange with a reporter during a Q&A promoting his new movie The Promised Land at the 2023 Venice Film Festival.

Mads Mikkelsen and The Promised Land director Nikolaj Arcel were confronted by a reporter about the “lack of diversity” on screen and how it could affect their possibilities of getting nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.

fired back at an unnamed reporter at the Venice Film Festival on Friday over a question regarding cast diversity in their new film, “The Promised Land.”The movie is set in 1750’s Denmark. Mikkelsen, 57, stars as an army captain struggling to raise his social status and maintain his values in an increasingly hostile climate.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent “On the Go,” a spirited, freewheeling road movie capturing the first lead performance in a movie of ‘Elite’ star Omar Ayuso, has clinched its first major sales, selling to Salzgeber for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and to Cineplex for Taiwan. Paris-based MPM Premium picked up world sales rights to “On the Go” in the run-up to the Locarno Festival where it world premiered in its Filmmakers of the Present section.

Aramide Tinubu Fairytales can easily bend and twist into nightmares, which is the core sentiment of Apple TV+’s adaptation of Victor LaValle’s award-winning novel, “The Changeling.” In the series, a young father, Apollo Kagwa (LaKeith Stanfield), embarks on a desperate search for his wife, Emma Valentine (Clark Backo), after she vanishes following a horrific incident shortly after the birth of their first child. Lavalle, who narrates this eight-episode series, set his book in New York City — across decades and realms, infusing Norwegian fairy tales with elements from the Black American experience, Ugandan traditions and magical folklore.

Can Finbar Murphy escape his past? “In The Land of Saints and Sinners” presents a mysterious man with a dark past who faces a crisis between doing what’s right and facing his own mistakes. Liam Neeson stars as Murphy, a man searching for solace and redemption; it’s yet another film that sees the actor carefully balance his dramatic roots with his recent success in high-profile action hits.

Based on a true story, they said, based on actual authentic events, but what does any of that matter if the actual story presented on screen doesn’t really resonate clearly or deeply? That’s the frustrating part of “Baltimore,” an intriguing but uneven new period-drama about an heiress turned Marxist revolutionary and radical, written and directed by Christine Molloy & Joe Lawlor, two Irish filmmakers (sometimes known as the creative pair Desperate Optimists) who emigrated from Ireland to England in the fraught and tumultuous 1980s during the Troubles when the IRA continued to mount their violent campaign aimed at ending British rule in Northern Ireland in order to create a united Ireland.

Christopher Vourlias The question of whether Hollywood stars will light up the Lido this week has roiled the film industry in the run-up to the Venice Film Festival. “Poor Things” lead actress Emma Stone was among the marquee names that were holding out for a SAG-AFTRA exemption allowing her to promote the Frankenstein-inspired period film from Oscar nominee Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Favourite”), which bowed in competition Friday to a lengthy standing ovation and rave reviews.

Mads Mikkelsen and his son Carl Jacobsen Mikkelsen make quite a dashing pair!

Mads Mikkelsen has proved time and again a master at playing quiet, rational, and seemingly harmless men who, when pushed, swiftly reveal themselves also to be skilled executioners; their pent-up rage does not bubble up so much as shoot out of them in sudden bursts of ultraviolence. Mikkelsen proves it once more in “The Promised Land,” the new period drama that reunites him with his “A Royal Affair” Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, and premieres in competition at the 80th Venice Film Festival this week.

Thank god for Alexander Payne. The filmmaker is, and always have been, a true humanist. A writer/director more interested in human beings, something that has always been the special effect of his movies. A two-time Oscar winning writer, his latest film, The Holdovers, which had its World Premiere Thursday at the Telluride Film Festival, is one of the rare movies in which he doesn’t also have a writing credit. David Hemingson did the screenplay, but the idea, an inspired one, came from Payne, a real film buff who was always intrigued by Marcel Pagnol’s 1935 French film Merlusse about a group of boarding school students stuck over the holidays with a much-despised teacher. The director thought it had the bones for a new story and developed with Hemingson. Still, set in 1970, it is Payne’s first period film after a celebrated career for movies like Sideways, The Descendants, and many others. He has made some contemporary classics, no doubt, but the warm humanity of a trio of people left alone at Christmas in a snowy boarding school, ranks right up there with his very best. It is funny, sad, witty, poignant, filled with snark and heart and great acting. It also manages to be a film set at the holidays that offers something truly new for the genre, and also delightfully not only evokes the period in which it is set, it also purposely looks like a movie made then.

It’s been 11 years since Mads Mikkelsen starred in Nikolaj Arcel’s Danish period drama A Royal Affair, one of 2012’s most raved about international films which also went on to an Oscar nomination. 

Guy Lodge Film Critic “The Promised Land” deserves a sexier title than “The Promised Land”: It’s hard to hear those well-worn words and not expect something as beige and starchy as the spuds grown on its titular terrain. It has one, in fact.