The Celebration (1998)
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg
The family of a wealthy businessman gather to celebrate his 60th birthday. During the course of the party, his eldest son presents a speech that reveals a devastating secret that turns the night into a battle of truth and denial.
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What critics compared The Celebration to
It's a micro-treatment of what most sci-fi eschatological tales take a more expansive view of: Think " When Worlds Collide " reconfigured as a Bergman film, or, to be more specific, as " The Celebration ," the 1998 family drama directed by von Trier's Danish sort-of disciple Thomas Vinterberg .
With a first hour that plays like 1998's " The Celebration " crossed with 2008's " Rachel Getting Married ," the film fascinatingly follows Justine around for much of the time without spelling out what it is that is wrong with her.
Shot by Claro in gloriously rich colors, the “Justine” half of “Melancholia” is a rich comedy of manners and buried family secrets, deliberately recalling Bergman’s country-house comedies, like “Wild Strawberries” or “Smiles of a Summer Night,” and also perhaps “The Celebration,” by von Trier’s onetime Dogme 95 collaborator Thomas Vinterberg.
In its lacerating portrait of an unhappy family dynamic, this half of the movie suggests "The Celebration" (1988), by von Trier's fellow Dane and former "Dogme 95" filmmaking compatriot, Thomas Vinterberg.
The first, titled 'Justine,' is all about the doomed wedding party and is very reminiscent of fellow Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg's "The Celebration."
Writer/director von Trier gleefully gathers all this emotional turmoil with his restless digi-cam, making this first chapter seem like an homage to The Celebration, by von Trier’s fellow Dogma ’95 disciple Thomas Vinterberg.
For a moment, it feels as if Demme and Lumet are trying to conjure the supernaturalism of the unhappy Danish family get-together in 1998's "The Celebration."
Rachel Getting Married has more in common with the great Dogme film The Celebration than last year’s overacted Margot at the Wedding.
Quinn's freewheeling cinematography at times recalls Dogme films like The Celebration.
Director Demme shoots most everything with a dispassionate hand-held camera that evokes the fine Danish drama "The Celebration," which centered around a family reunion not unlike this one, captured the tense, dramatic events via a natural filmmaking style, and featured an actor, Ulrich Thomsen, who looks not unlike Bill Irwin here (Irwin plays the patriarch and his is a fine performance too, as is Rosemarie DeWitt's as the eponymous Rachel).
There is a lot of The Celebration, probably the best of all the Dogma films, in Rachel.
The Darwin chart of this breed of American indie, otherwise known as unlikely shrines to The Celebration (or Festen, if you prefer), follows in the United States with something like Margot at the Wedding near the top as most-evolved down mid-way to Rachel Getting Married and its histrionic Demme-tasse reduction, down to ankle-deep--we're talking primordial muck--with Dan in Real Life.
Or is it, like Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Celebration,” a matter of everything that goes wrong is very right and simply hasn’t been spoken aloud even though it demands to be spoken aloud?
While the high bar for reunions gone wrong is “The Celebration,” Kusama’s abstract approach suggests Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” by way of Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” (with a touch of Ti West’s Jonestown-inspired “The Sacrament”).
But to divulge any more of "Coherence" -- a bit like Thomas Vinterberg's "The Celebration" by head-spinning way of the best of "The Twilight Zone" -- would take the piss out of the whole thing.
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DP Anthony Dod Mantle—who proved in 1998’s The Celebration that he wasn’t afraid to put cameras anywhere he damn well pleased—achieves a kind of ubiquity of viewpoint, right down to extreme close-ups of paintwork on asphalt.
The proof was in the plodding: Although there have been a few genuinely absorbing and entertaining Dogme movies ("The Celebration" and "Italian for Beginners" leap to mind), most of them, including von Trier's own tiresome exercise "The Idiots," have been little more than pretentious, self-conscious film-school essays that have received publicity not because of any inherent interest or artistry but because their directors have usually accompanied their releases with tortured mea culpas about the vows that they broke, such as pulling back a curtain to increase a room's light.
In adapting Hardy’s novel, director Vinterberg – a Dogme 95 founding member traveling far afield from his already-wide sweep of subject and stylization (The Hunt, It’s All About Love, The Celebration) – and screenwriter David Nicholls (One Day) have two precedents to consider: not just Hardy’s source material, but also John Schlesinger’s 1967 witty, feverish go at the story.
After tackling Hardy's 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' for a BBC production, novelist/screenwriter David Nicholls ("One Day") has taken a crack for director Thomas Vinterberg ("The Celebration," "The Hunt") whose star Carey Mulligan is much better suited to the material than Christie was.
After his 1998 breakthrough with The Celebration, director Thomas Vinterberg could have done more or less anything he wanted.
Thus the director is Thomas Vinterberg, the Dane known as one of the original founders of the Dogme 95 and creator of one of the best films to come out of that avant-garde film movement, “The Celebration.”
Director Thomas Vinterberg (best known for The Celebration) has a strong grasp of setting, as he showed in The Hunt (2012), a film as much about Danish rural traditions as about its ostensible subject.
Director Thomas Vinterberg ("The Hunt," "The Celebration") and screenwriter David Nicholls ("One Day," "Starter for 10") cut to the heart of Hardy's Victorian tale.
Thomas Vinterberg’s Danish drama The Hunt (2012) is his best film since The Celebration and, no surprise, it mines similar themes and volatile emotions that are churned up the surface.
With echoes of the Danish filmmaker's 1998 drama The Celebration (a family reunion, allegations of sexual abuse), Vinterberg's new film won its star, Mads Mikkelsen, the award for best actor at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.
It’s in this bucolic little retreat that director Thomas Vinterberg (“The Celebration”) creates a modern-day “Crucible,” a frighteningly plausible examination of how suspicion can spread through otherwise decent people.
21) and "The Hunt" -- the latest from Thomas Vinterberg, director of the modern masterpiece, "The Celebration" -- at 2 p.m. Sunday (Sept.
Danish director Thomas Vinterberg drew international attention with his anxious 1998 drama The Celebration, about a family reunion that deteriorates when one of the grown children publicly accuses his father of sexual abuse.