This is a cracking film, though the good people of the Icelandic tourist board may be holding their heads in their hands.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 20, 2018

A remarkable writer-director gifted with razor-sharp wit and an uncanny grasp of human foibles, Sigurðsson is the best approximation to a 21st century Billy Wilder that contemporary cinema has to offer.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 14, 2018

It's a striking, if slightly silly, curio from the writer-director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurdsson: 85 minutes of Bergman-lite topped off with five minutes of Tarantino.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 10, 2018

Opts for Grand Guignol over subtle nuance, but entertaining nonetheless.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 10, 2018

Sigurðsson is no misanthrope and his humane message - that everyone is muddling along as best they can - makes all the feuding and bile easier to stomach.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 10, 2018

Under The Tree is a macabre and darkly funny slice of Icelandic noir - a bit like Fargo done Reykjavik-style.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 9, 2018

Imagine a Mike Leigh film with fangs, directed in a style of Nordic deadpan.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 8, 2018

Grim stuff, gloriously so.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 20, 2018

Sigurdsson has crafted an exhilaratingly sly dark comedy about ordinary suburbanite folk going from unglued to unhinged to ultimately undone.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 19, 2018

A less interesting movie might simply have served up a headlong plunge into the abyss - but Sigurdsson gives us a tiny flicker of light.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 13, 2018

Sigurdsson clearly has his finger on the pulse, not only of smoothly engrossing filmmaking, but also his own anxious times.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 10, 2018

What makes it a better-than-average satire on the unthinking hostilities that human beings are prone to is its steady intelligence, combined with a humor sometimes so dry as to be undetectable.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 6, 2018

You know about good things and small packages; this is a dark and startling thing in a brightly wrapped package, and the brightness is all the more misleading because the action takes place during Iceland's radiant summer.

| Jul 6, 2018

Under the Tree may be a demonstration of Sayre's law, but Sigurðsson doesn't reduce his characters to faceless suburbanites, ripe for the skewering. Their misdeeds are chillingly relatable.

| Jul 5, 2018

A blacker than black comedy that is so savage you often don't know whether to shudder or laugh.

| Jul 5, 2018

Maintaining an unrelentingly gleeful grip on the film's tone, Mr. Sigurdsson skillfully whips absurdist comedy and chilling tragedy into a froth of surging hostilities.

| Jul 5, 2018

Here the vice is familiar but still worth satirizing...the performances are convincing, each actor committed to a gently heightened naturalism no matter how outlandish the film's reality gets.

| Jul 2, 2018

Depraved comedy and intimate domestic drama fight for supremacy in Iceland's Under the Tree -- a dark, discomfiting farce that plays like David Lynch for the umlaut set.

| Original Score: B | Jul 2, 2018

Under the Tree boasts the lurid determinism of many acclaimed European films that spit-shine genre-film tropes with chilly compositions and fashionable hopelessness.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 2, 2018

Hafsteinn Sigurðsson's film begins as a trifling neighborhood dispute about an overgrown shade tree and ends as a violent tug-of-war with alarmingly high stakes.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 16, 2018