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

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

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

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

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

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

| Jul 14, 2007

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

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

His camera, whether focused upon acts of horrific brutality or humdrum routine, maintains a steady, unflinching gaze. This, it seems to say, is life and death and nothing else.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 6, 2007

Dumont (L'humanité, Twentynine Palms) mounts the brutish combat sequences with undeniable small-scale skill, though his constant see-sawing between images of sex and death verges on the masturbatory.

| Jul 6, 2007

Like Dumont's best work, it echoes uneasily in the mind.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 6, 2007

Dumont is one of those rare directors who knows what it means to shoot the unspeakable truth. God knows, but we should be grateful. But God should also know about the shame.

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

Memorably compassionate.

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

mont doesn't hate his characters; he just thinks they're stupid: no one thinks, no one learns, everyone acts. It's the most Godless film you'll see all year.

| Original Score: 4/6 | Jul 6, 2007

Harrowing and complex, this study in terror is not for the faint of heart.

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

Don't fight this movie. Just release and get onto its wavelength.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 22, 2007

This deeply felt vision of the human condition has more resonance than yet another movie concluding that war is hell.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 8, 2007

From the evidence of Flanders, Mr. Dumont's career demands further study on my part should the opportunity arise.

Full Review | May 23, 2007