decelle This film has been made before,its about a family reunion. With all the hidden emotions, frustations and dark secretsthat are revieled. But the most interesting aspect is the location. A small fisher village in Iceland it give us an idea howpeople survive, or not it a cold dark place. If this is real life it is not surprising that everybodyhas a secret in the film. At the end the everybodeis aims is to take the money and run away from everyone and anything. Even the sheep in the film tries to escape.

tarchon Reasonably well acted and written, and it had what I went to it for, namely Iceland, but otherwise it was the same old dysfunctional family melodrama I've seen 500 times before. It was occasionally interesting to note parallels to the old sagas - Icelandic writers seem to be constitutionally incapable of not referring to them, but I guess if you have a living 1000 year old literary tradition, you might as well use it. If it was set in New York, I wouldn't have wasted my time on it though. If you've seen a lot of movies, you'll probably be thinking things like "not the freaking dinner-table meltdown scene again" as you watch it go through all the standard dysfunctional-family plot devices.

likai So this is the third Icelandic film I see in a very short time and it's the worst. The director made a pretty good job with 101 Reykjavik, although I was not that impressed by it, it's still miles ahead of this film in every respect. Quite frankly I had a strong feeling that the people involved in this film were trying to make the ultimate European art house formula, which in my opinion is at times even worse than the most formulatic Hollywood films. Well the formula fails dramatically here. This film has it all, outdoor sex scenes in snow covered lagoons, pretensious dialogue, the hardship of life in the north. It tries to hard to include everything a film festival would want from a foreign film and it ends up being a second class version of the Danish film The Celebration. There is nothing original in anything, it's flat and boring at times and the acting and direction at the best of times border on the very pretensious. I really think scandinavian cinema needs to find a new direction if this is what they want to offer us.

drweir The Sea is Baltasar Kormákur's second movie as a director. He showed real prospect with his debut, 101 Reykjavik, and now he's ensembled a big part of Iceland's most respected actors for another shot at an Icelandic community. THis time he goes out into a small fishervillage and follows an emotional showdown in the village's richest family. I'm not going to reveal the whole plot at this point as not to spoil the experience of seeing the film. Instead i'm trying to share my experience of it.Firstly, the acting and directing is quite something. Gunnar Eyjólfsson, a respected stage-actor, gets his first big movie-role here, and absolutely takes my breath away with his powerful performance. Hilmir Snaer Gudnason, the star of 101, establishes himself as one of Iceland's best actors. Actually, there are too many leading roles here to name them all, but there's nowhere a weak link in the cast.The cinematography is very good, and does nothing but enhance the mood in the film. No flaws in editing, or any other technical aspect of the film.The only minor flaws I noticed were that when the movie is reaching its climax, one tends to get a little confused, with all those characters and all, but it didn't really bother me much.So, I saw this movie as extremely powerful, both visually and emotionally, with great musical score, real feelings, and a very black and cool humor. Nine out of ten!!!