This one is definitely not for everybody.

| May 21, 2020

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 16, 2011

[A] stilted, affected term-paper treatise on the human condition.

| Original Score: C- | Oct 7, 2009

A congealed shrug

| Aug 27, 2009

Self-important film that presumes it has something pertinent to say about the human condition but doesn't.

| Original Score: C | Feb 3, 2008

Enough is left vague that an abstract quality is achieved, and the effect is one of amplification of the themes running throughout the film.

| Original Score: 76/100 | Jan 7, 2008

Dumont is much more confident when he sticks to the title town and the young woman the men left behind; his habit of alternating close shots with extreme long shots and his singularly unsentimental way of showing sex are as distinctive as ever.

| Jan 3, 2008

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 7, 2007

Sexually voyeuristic, low IQ take on the denizens of farm country.

| Nov 14, 2007

This film has few tangible pleasures, such as some somber shots of Demester walking far away in a field. Its achievement is theoretical.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 17, 2007

The harsh and lovely achievement of Bruno Dumont's Flanders is its mixture of the concrete and the abstract. It isn't about a specific war. It's about conflict of every stripe, in any time.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 16, 2007

Dumont's gift for dramatic expression of physical space and sensuously conceived landscape is undeniable. If only he had attached a coherent story to his vividly evoked sense of surroundings.

Full Review | Aug 4, 2007

Anything but comforting. With its depiction of bestial behavior and shocking wartime violence, it's the kind of film that polarizes viewers through the raw power of its imagery.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 3, 2007

It's more provocative than realistic and his naturalism is contained in an arch structure, but his directness is affecting ...

| Original Score: B | Aug 2, 2007

French filmmaker Bruno Dumont urges his audience to delve beneath the movie's melodramatic, often graphic surface and experience the film sensorially rather than intellectually.

| Jul 26, 2007

This is not a film of youth or wisdom -- it's not even a film of real intelligence. And so we flit between war and relative peace, with no insight or feeling or compelling style.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 20, 2007

Among his other deficiencies, Dumont is ... utterly humorless. ... Flanders will leave you nostalgic for the wacky hijinx of films like Persona and The Passion of the Christ.

Full Review | Jul 15, 2007

Dumont effectively conjures between the dreary routine of everyday life and the normalised horrors of this nameless conflict.

| Jul 14, 2007

Flanders is relentlessly bleak, but as it works its way into your bloodstream, the aftertaste is somewhat akin to relief...For those who allow it, Flanders offers the comfort of recognition, and acceptance, of what it means to be human.

| Jul 10, 2007

Flanders is a film you'll either admire or hate.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 6, 2007