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100One of the best films to open in the Bay Area in 2007.
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100A highly original and unusually powerful drama that deserves comparison to the great Scandinavian films of the past.
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91Talented filmmaker Susanne Bier (Brothers), armed with an outstanding compositional sense, keeps control over the storms of melodrama that swirl in this rich weepie.
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91It's a riveting character study/soap opera.
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90What feels at first like a quiet, straightforward picture builds into one of the richest and most satisfying of the year so far, in any genre or any language.
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90A thrilling -- and harrowing, and beautiful -- celebration of the unpredictability of life.
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88After the Wedding defies the odds: For once, the bigger the emotion, the truer the moviegoing experience.
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88Bier primes us for a catfight, but she gives something tastier: a feast of reconciliation and love.
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88With a third-act twist that outdoes that initial revelation, the film turns out to be a thoughtful exploration of paternity and responsibility. Much of the film's success lies in Bier's sensitive direction, but credit is also due to the fine cast, particularly Mikkelsen.
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88Mikkelsen, like Jimmy Stewart, projects emotions with a slight twitch of a lip or narrowing of an eye. His long face - often handsome, sometimes plain, always cryptic - yields secrets slowly; you have to watch an entire film to know how his character feels and how you feel about him.
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80Once again Bier demonstrates just how misleading appearances can be, as she artfully removes the veneers concealing the dark truths locked away by her intriguing characters.
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80After the Wedding would never pretend to have any answers, but in hands this skilled the act of exploration itself couldn't be more illuminating, or more dramatic.
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80A rich, intricate and very gripping movie.
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80Thanks to a tight script, sharp direction and excellent actors, new film by Danish helmer Susanne Bier manages to be both emotional and engaging.
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80Wedding has enough coincidences, screamfests, drunken rants and shock revelations to fill a season of "Desperate Housewives," but it comes across as finely textured drama, thanks to the performers, who make their characters so persuasive and three-dimensional, we're too mesmerized to care about the story's more overwrought or histrionic passages.
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80Bier directs with a sense of motion, pleasant without pushing. Mads Mikkelsen, who plays Jacob, is an actor who absolutely belongs on the screen, a gentler sort of Jack Palance.
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Unfortunately, in Bier’s world, where even the most innocuous acts can result in emotional ruin, redemption is purgatorial in its own peculiar way.
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75After the Wedding ends up feeling far weightier than it first appears, with its plot contrivances and unlikely coincidences generating such a messy range of emotions, they end up feeling a lot like real life.
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75The characters may suffer once the bride walks down the aisle, but Bier, Jensen and their first-rate cast work together like a match made in heaven.
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75After the Wedding is full of enough plot twists to supply a whole season of "Desperate Housewives."
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75In After the Wedding Susanne Bier pushes the envelope further, toward operatic passion and the visual symbolism of Ingmar Bergman.
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75This is a fine tale of families and secrets, and its seemingly cold exterior gives way to something unexpectedly warm and soft inside.
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75Those willing to overlook its emotional grandstanding will find much to admire and even more to think about in this Oscar-nominated Danish drama.
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What happens after the wedding comprises a full three-quarters of Bier's epic, whose near-Biblical twists and turns--I wouldn't think of giving them away--are enough to fill four weepies.
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70A fine and, on a scene-by-scene basis, often better than fine, if effectively unadventurous work.
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70Jensen's dramatic structure is so visible this sometimes seems like a late Rod Serling teleplay, but Bier has proved highly adept at merging conventional drama with the immediacy of the Dogma 95 movement.
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67With its soapy earnestness and use of suffering souls as set dressing, After The Wedding could be the cinematic equivalent of a Coldplay song. And while that isn't necessarily a slam, it isn't a recommendation either.
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63At two hours, After the Wedding stretches out family flux too thinly and waits too long to reveal the final, devastating secret that we already know.
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50Evidently, this bloated piece of Oscar-nominated nonsense was a big hit in Denmark, which makes me think there's a glittering future in that otherwise discriminating country for several seasons of "Days of Our Lives."
User score distribution:
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Positive: 12 out of 13
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Mixed: 0 out of 13
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Negative: 1 out of 13
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DougE10Extremely well done.
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roberti8A film as fresh and unanticipated as the sky. a story that rings true, actors that don't pander, a view that seems lifelike.
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AlS8Melodramatic but effective nonetheless.