Cinema as a mass-manufactured snow globe.

| Original Score: 2/6 | Nov 16, 2011

Hamer creates a quirky, beguiling, and very funny mood piece that reflects on age, adventure, uncertainty, and humanity. Owe gives the character of Horten an off-center dignity that will suggest comparisons to Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton

| Aug 23, 2009

A spare and perfectly droll kinda-sorta comedy.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 7, 2009

The whimsy is never overplayed. The peculiar isn't teased at any character's expense.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 24, 2009

This yarn about a train conductor whose life goes off track is Nordic to its bones: efficient, humane and droll in small measures.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 26, 2009

Thanks to the consistent deadpan tone that Hamer and Owe establish, it's oddly satisfying.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 19, 2009

Pointedly strange and whimsical, O'Horten mixes the surreal with the mundane in its depiction of the retirement and eventual rebirth of a train engineer.

| Original Score: B | Jun 19, 2009

Bent Hamer has proved himself an apt pupil of such deadpan comic filmmakers as Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismaki.

| Jun 19, 2009

Depending on your patience for oddball mood pieces, you will either sleep through O' Horten or be oddly captivated. Either way, it'll be like dreaming.

| Jun 19, 2009

Not quite the absurdist gem that was Bent Hamer's 2004 release, Kitchen Stories, the Norwegian director's O'Horten is nonetheless a deadpan delight.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 11, 2009

O'Horten is a precise, deadpan drama of slapstick existentialism -- a Bent Hamer movie, in other words.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 11, 2009

[Director] Hamer has a gift for observational comedy, previously demonstrated in the droll Kitchen Stories, and also for the exquisite framing of wintry images.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 5, 2009

Filmmaker Hamer isn't being cruel here. He's trying to tell us that conquering the ridiculous is one of life's necessary joys.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 5, 2009

Powered by lush cinematography, a moody score, and Owe's subtly majestic lead performance, O'Horten oscillates confidently between the mundane and the rapturously beautiful.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 4, 2009

The thing about a deadpan comedy is, it must involve us in the lives of its characters, so we can understand why they are funny while at the same time so distant. O'Horten, a bittersweet whimsy by the Norwegian director Bent Hamer, finds that effortless.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 4, 2009

Jack Nicholson's dyspeptic retiree in About Schmidt would no doubt identify with O'Horten's entertaining pain.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 3, 2009

A small masterpiece of poignant deadpan humor.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 22, 2009

Strangeness, humor and melancholy of aging are deftly explored.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 22, 2009

A quiet, oddly serene movie with a curious soul.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 22, 2009

Made up of meticulously constructed, deadpan scenes that turn on Keatonesque visual jokes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 22, 2009