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88Except for the tractors, and the tanks in the later desert battle sequences, Flanders could be taking place centuries ago. Or centuries from now.
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88Unspeakable brutality ensues, including a rape, a castration and cold-blooded murder. Dumont never mentions Iraq, but the parallels are clear.
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88With very little dialogue and lingering shots of the landscape -- always a very important visual trope in Dumont's deep-psyche explorations -- the film is nevertheless tighter and, clocking in at under 90 minutes, relatively brief.
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80Harrowing and complex, this study in terror is not for the faint of heart.
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80The film arrives at a familiar conclusion -- that war is hell -- but the getting there is made uniquely unsettling by Dumont's relentlessly anti-psychological disposition.
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80Nonprofessional actors Boidin and Leroux deliver intense performances which shoulder the emotional weight of the film.
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80Flanders, which takes us from the rustic heartland of northern France to the killing fields of an unnamed foreign locale, has such a primitive poetry, we are moved even by its most gruesome moments.
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75This film has few tangible pleasures, such as some somber shots of Demester walking far away in a field. Its achievement is theoretical. It wants to depict lives that are without curiosity, introspection and hope.
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75Underneath the seeming blandness of its presentation -- the sparse dialogue, the affectless characters -- there's a ferocious and caustic view of humanity.
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With razor-sharp precision, Dumont interweaves scenes of battle with the unravelling of a young woman back home, involved with two of the soldiers. But this is not bleakness just for the sake of it. When it arrives, the ray of hope rings perfectly true for being so devoid of artifice.
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70Whether you like or loathe Mr. Dumont's movies, his unsettling vision of humanity stripped of cultural finery feels profoundly truthful.
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70A somber, beautifully acted reflection on the barbarity of war and the bestiality of man.
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67Once again, Dumont cycles through the pet themes of films like "L'Humanité" and "Twentynine Palms," but their repetition is beginning to seem like shtick.
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60Bruno Dumont's Flanders is something you don't see everyday: a decidedly non-sentimental love story.
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50As a fan, it's upsetting to admit that Dumont's ideas and insights have narrowed with this picture, his relaxed pacing now lethargic, his physically and mentally thick characters too familiar, and his ice-water shocks a bit predictable. It would seem self-parodic if it weren't so damn tragic.
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50Dumont 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.
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38A powerful film of suffering and sacrifice and desperation. But it's vacuous, banal, and, where its mix of sentiment and grisliness is concerned, rather despicable.
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30Pretentious to the core and lacking any context or credible characterizations.
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Flanders is, dontcha know, a state of mind, and Dumont is plain out of his.
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FaronW10Best film of 2006, or any year for that matter. Dare you to see it!
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RobertH.5If you've seen a Bruno Dumont film before or even if you haven't it all gets real old real fast.