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    ‘Dept. Q’ Review: Netflix’s Nordic-British-American Noir

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    Matthew Goode plays a traumatized Edinburgh detective in a complicated cold-case series that’s less than the sum of its influences.“Dept. Q,” this week’s new cop show on Netflix, is a study in internationalism. Largely written and directed by an American, Scott Frank, it is based on a novel by the Danish crime writer Jussi Adler-Olsen and set and filmed in Scotland with a British cast led by Matthew Goode.That might stand out given the current trans-Atlantic vibe, but of course the show, which premieres Thursday, has been in the works for years. And if anyone is going to remain committed to peaceful relationships across multiple markets, it will be Netflix.The ambitious, nine-episode season also reflects the history of Frank, a talented writer and director who has had his highs (“Out of Sight,” “The Queen’s Gambit”) and his lows (“Monsieur Spade”). He likes to roam among genres, with a home base in literary American crime (“Out of Sight,” “Hoke,” “A Walk Among the Tombstones”) but forays into the western (“Godless”), science fiction (“Minority Report”), period melodrama (“The Queen’s Gambit”) and others.For “Dept. Q,” in which Goode plays a damaged Edinburgh detective tasked with assembling a new cold-case unit, Frank (who developed the show with the British writer Chandni Lakhani) gets to play mix-and-match in one place. The influence of Nordic noir on the traditional British mystery has been established for several decades now, but Frank adds some American flavor to the cocktail.The buddy-cop pairing of Goode’s Carl Morck and Alexej Manvelov’s Akram Salim, a Syrian immigrant with an unsettling knack for extracting confessions, is probably more richly drawn than it would be otherwise; the interplay of Goode and Manvelov is one of the show’s main pleasures. And as is usually the case in Frank’s productions, “Dept. Q” has an overall flow and fluency — a style that is, if not always seductive, consistently engaging.(A 2013 Danish film based on the same source, “The Keeper of Lost Causes,” is dour by comparison, though some might find its 96-minute running time preferable to the seven and a half hours of the series.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Freud’s Last Session’ Review: Film Adaptation and Its Discontents

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      Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis probably never met. What the stage-based film presupposes is: Maybe they did?In “Freud’s Last Session,” when the Oxford academic C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) arrives late to the London home of Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins), Freud’s chow chow, Jofi, brushes him off. The dog, Freud explains, values punctuality.The men’s encounter — concocted for Mark St. Germain’s 2009 play of the same title — is imaginary, but the timing is not. The setting is September 1939, and Hitler has invaded Poland. The atheist Freud has sought out Lewis, whom he has never met, to learn how such a sterling intellect could believe in God. Given the historical backdrop (we hear radio of Neville Chamberlain announcing Britain’s entry into the war), that hardly seems like the most pressing topic. That’s true even if Freud, who has oral cancer, would be dead before the end of that month.But the war context gives the director, Matthew Brown, who shares screenwriting credit with St. Germain, license to wage a futile campaign against the material’s stage-bound origins. An air raid siren sends Lewis and Freud out of the house and to a nearby church, where Freud helps Lewis through a triggered recollection of his service in World War I. Freud shows off his surprising expertise in Christian iconography, after dismissing his interest as simple art appreciation.The men return to Freud’s den, but the movie, already diffuse with flashbacks, is hardly content to stay put. Before the tête-à-tête is over, the film will have shown us Lewis in the trenches (Freud is fascinated by Lewis’s fixation on the mother of a fallen friend); the Gestapo’s arrest and improbable release of Freud’s youngest daughter, Anna, before the family’s flight from Vienna; and Freud’s father chiding young Sigmund after seeing the boy cross himself.Expanding what was a two-character play, the film adds a major part for Anna (Liv Lisa Fries), a pioneer in the field of child psychoanalysis. Her devotion to her father is depicted as so intense that a colleague diagnoses an attachment disorder. But her dad refuses to accept that she is in a relationship with a woman, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham (Jodi Balfour). And his professional curiosity about her mind may have monstrously overpowered his compassion as a father.What a viewer (or a therapist) should take from their queasily etched codependency is unclear, and it’s not certain that the script made sense of it, either. But the Sigmund-Anna muddle has more juice than the genteel intellectual parrying between Sigmund and C.S. (or Jack, as he was known to familiars), which has been carefully written to a draw. Lewis argues that the Gospels can’t be myths because they are too disorganized. Freud scoffs that “bad storytelling” doesn’t prove Christ was a divine figure. Lewis pounces when Freud unthinkingly says, “Thank God.” Later, Freud asks how God could let him lose a daughter to the flu and a grandson to tuberculosis.Eventually they bridge their differences, in a détente made grotesquely literal (and Freudian?) when Lewis reaches into Freud’s mouth to help with a dental prosthesis. Hopkins already argued the other side of this case when he played an older, Narnia-era Lewis in “Shadowlands” (1993) — a Lewis who, oddly, gave a near-identical speech to this film’s Freud about humanity’s need to “grow up.” In any case, Hopkins parlayed Lewis’s propriety, airs and implied discomfort around sex into a more compelling character than Goode has been given, and one who — faced with his wife’s death — urgently considered the absence of God.The look of “Freud’s Last Session” could make one doubt the presence of a cinematographer. Shot after shot is so gray, shadowy and colorless that it’s hard not to wonder why Brown didn’t shoot in black-and-white, whose contrast and timelessness would suit the stakes. The filmmakers might argue that black-and-white is no longer commercially viable. But Freud would say that nobody wanted anyone to see this movie.Freud’s Last SessionRated PG-13. A cigar that’s just a cigar. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Medieval’ Review: Flaying Alive

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      Living up to its title, this ultraviolent ode to a Czech national hero bludgeons you into submission.A cohort of notable actors — including Michael Caine, Ben Foster and Matthew Goode — tromp through “Medieval,” Petr Jakl’s lumbering epic about the storied Czech warrior Jan Zizka. The movie’s real stars, though, are its gaping wounds and mangled limbs, the singing of scythe and ax more eloquent than any dialogue.On land and underwater, the verisimilitude of the violence is numbing. Horses are elbowed over cliffs; a man’s brain is leisurely puréed by means of a saw through the ears. By the end, scarcely an orifice remains inviolate, the camera’s blood lust seemingly insatiable. Yet beneath the clanging of chain mail and the gurgles of the dying, a story peeks out: The throne of the Holy Roman Empire is up for grabs and coveted by two feuding brothers. To prevent the corrupt sibling (Goode, lazily scheming) and his wealthy wing man from prevailing, a powerful lord (Caine) arranges to have the wing man’s fiancée, Lady Katherine (a wan Sophie Lowe), kidnapped. As operatic choirs muster on the soundtrack, a morose mercenary named Zizka (Foster), gets the assignment; a small empire’s worth of knights and peasants gets kaput.Glum and bludgeoning, “Medieval” serves up a melancholic hero — see how it pains Zizka to take all these lives! — and a limp love interest-cum-bargaining chip. Hauled from one battle to the next, Katherine can do little but gaze, mouth agape, at the carnage, rallying now and then to declaim on the era’s social inequities and to pack maggots into Zizka’s newly vacated eye socket.“Are you all right?” Zizka tenderly inquires at one point, though, if you ask me, the movie’s addition of that hungry lion was maybe a barbarism too far.MedievalRated R. Fans of slicing, smashing, gouging and impaling will be in heaven. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Silent Night’ Review: Waiting for the End of the World

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      In this feature from Camille Griffin, a group of friends facing global disaster have one last Christmas dinner.Production of “Silent Night,” a survival horror film directed by Camille Griffin, started before the Covid-19 pandemic, but it’s hard not to watch and interpret it within that context.The film follows a group of friends who spend Christmas at an idyllic countryside cottage in rural England with Nell (Keira Knightley), Simon (Matthew Goode) and their three children. Behind the Christmas cheer, it’s clear that the world outside the cottage is in peril, and the friends have made a pact to make a drastic escape.The danger is never fully explained, but there appears to be a noxious cloud of toxins engulfing the Earth that painfully kills those exposed to it. Throughout, the children often serve as proxies for adults, engaging in political conversations while their parents reminisce or talk about who slept with whom in high school. Art (Roman Griffin Davis), one of Nell’s children, watches videos online that seem to contradict his parents’ messaging, and he starts to question their choices.The timing of “Silent Night” makes it destined to be viewed as a Covid-19 film, but it’s actually about climate change and the government’s inaction in the crisis. It’s an eerie movie that emphasizes the ways in which children are vulnerable to adults’ decisions, and how the wealthy skirt responsibility and protect their own. Most of the adult characters seem to be living inside a conspiracy theory, blinded by their own fear and resigned to their impending doom. But the characters, despite their histrionic representation of the wealthy class, are not compelling enough to carry the movie, nor are the horrors of the outside world fleshed out enough to frighten. Ultimately, the movie seems to ask: In the face of a dying world, should we give up or stay and fight?Silent NightNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and on AMC+. More