It is a performances centric movie

i must have seen a different film!!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

The family man Major Michael Lundberg (Ulrich Thomsen) is happily married with his beloved Sarah (Connie Nielsen) and adores his two daughters Natalia (Sarah Juel Werner) and Camilla (Rebecca Løgstrup Soltau). His younger brother Jannik (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) has just left prison on probation for bank robbery and has issues with his father Henning (Bent Mejding). Michael invites Jannik to have dinner at home with their family. When Michael arrives in Afghanistan, his helicopter crashes and he is considered missing in action. However, he is captured and sent to a camp where he meets the radar technician Niels Peter (Paw Henriksen). After a long period imprisoned, Micahel is forced to kill Niels with a bar to survive. Meanwhile Jannick comforts Sarah and the children and he becomes close to Michael's family. When Michael is rescued, he comes back home emotionally detached and paranoid. Further, he is convinced that Sarah and Jannik have slept together during his absence. When the envious Natalia lies during the birthday dinner party of her sister telling that her mother and Jannik had shagged to upset her father, the disturbed Michael triggers an intense paranoia jeopardizing his family. "Brødre" is a powerful and realistic drama about lives destroyed by war. This film is extremely well-acted, with an adequate cast that gives credibility to the plot led by the gorgeous and excellent Connie Nielsen. The sensitive director Susanne Bier of "Efter Brylluppet" makes another extraordinary movie based on the family dynamics. Jim Sheridan remade this film in 2009, but in a shallow teen "americanization" version. My vote is nine.Title (Brazil): "Brothers"

With its American remake a thing of recent memory, Brødre began steadily to tempt me more and more. A great admirer of co-screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen and general fan of Danish cinema, I recently acquiesced to these mental demands.Having just collected his irksome and opprobrious brother Jannik from prison, Michael sits down to a last family dinner before shipping off to Afghanistan. As he prepares to leave behind wife Sarah and their two daughters, his younger and less adulated counterpart argues with their father. When Michael is reported MIA presumed dead, Jannik is forced to pull himself together to take care of the family his brother has unwillingly left behind.A film based almost entirely on the complexity of familial dynamics, Brødre quickly establishes each of these to us even before Michael departs early into the film. We see instantly the strained relationship between Jannik and his father, the unmistakable fraternal bond, the love of a father for his daughters, and the quiet trepidation of a family sending one of their own to unknown territory. Brødre's strength lies, as well as in the clarity and accuracy of its characters' relationships, in co-writer/director Susanne Bier's ability to forge a subtle yet almost tangible tension and animosity in scenes. Her film combines the merest of glances with the shortest of sighs to show us all those things exposition cannot, the weariness of a son living in his brother's shadow one of many such things conveyed almost subliminally. Regular parallels are drawn between the film's two settings, the shots regularly mirroring each other and flickering from the eyes of one character to another. Nikolaj Lie Kaas delivers a consistently brilliant performance, the film's best in my eyes, expertly combining the general dislikeability of his character with the softer kinder touches which cause the audience to warm to him. Both Nielsen and Thomsen offer fine performances, but the true praise belongs to their characters' children, the young actresses churning out astonishing displays of genuine emotion to shame their elders. Issues of family, jealousy, love, and lust are covered in equal measure, though the standout theme is that of war and the horrors engendered by its experience. Thomsen's granite face of stoicism tells a story no words ever can, affording us much emotion and further drawing us into this compelling and engaging story. To highlight a flaw, the cinematography was not always the most appealing, the film's low budget shining through in this respect, though never detracting from the effect of the film itself.Upholding the hugely high standard I've come to expect from the Danes, Brødre serves up an intriguing and entirely real family drama, bringing with it a rumination upon war and the effect it has upon those who are involved in it both directly and indirectly. Not afraid to put its characters, and thereby its audience, in a difficult place, it makes for a unique and memorable viewing that offers plenty to chew on.

I've been there. I've had the training. I know what you are supposed to do. But sometimes life happens when you are looking the other way. Two brothers - one a criminal and the other a soldier; one a respected member of society, and the other the shame of his family; one just out of prison, and the other off to Afghanistan.Writer/director Susanne Bier presents a compelling drama that examines how people react to stress, and how people can suddenly change when circumstances call for it. It was beautifully shot, it has a compelling score, and it had one of the most beautiful actresses of our time in Connie Nielsen.Nielsen was incredible as the wife of the soldier (Ulrich Thomsen), trying to keep things together when he was reported dead. She had to show even greater strength when he returned damaged by the war. In the middle was the younger brother (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) who stepped in to help with Michael's two daughters.The story of this family and how they dealt with tragedy was compelling. Anyone who has a family member come back from war can relate.It is not to be missed.

Rarely a film comes along that resonates not only due to its aesthetic quality, but also metaphorically on the level of personal experience. Brothers is such a film. When I saw it, I was blown away.Michael (Ulrich Thompson) is the older and more stable brother of Jannik, played by the by now Danish Superstar Nikolaj Lie Kass, who must first bail his brother out of jail, then report to duty as a soldier in Afghanistan. The helicopter of his platoon is quickly shot down, and Michael finds himself held as a prisoner by an Afghan warlord with one other of his soldiers.Meanwhile, Michael's absence seems to have a good effect on Jannik, who befriends his family and children, and by all observances begins to turn his life around. In an interesting scene, the Afghan leader who has gotten a hold of a shoulder rocket but doesn't know how to use it, asks how assemble it. He confronts the other soldier who doesn't have the know-how how to arm it. When he starts to scream and it looks like he is going to kill them both, Michael Calmly steps in and shows all the steps necessary for engagement of the missile. Now everyone knows that this rocket will now be used to kill as many as a dozen more soldiers, but this is a choice that a person, Michael, has made under pressure that peaked my interest and almost sent chills down my spine. This is a person who loves his family so much and wants to live so badly to see them again, so much so, that he doesn't care for the moment that others will die, he just wants to live.The Afghani quietly notices Michael's will to survive, and soon thereafter off-handedly orders him to kill his comrade. By hand. Michael refuses, then when threatened summons up his will, and yes courage, and beats his comrade to death. It was like a 5.7 tremor shook when this happened. He wants to live so much, and feels he has so much to live for, that he is willing to do anything.Back home, Jannik and Michael's wife, Sarah (played by attractive Connie Nielsen), get news of Michael's death. Since Jannik has become one of the family and spends much time with them, opportunities arise for infidelity, served up with savory dramatic irony for the audience in the pitch-black theater. A raid on the Afghan camp ensues, and in moments Michael is free. And this is the beauty and power of the picture; after his release he is free in the physical sense but is in a spiritual choke hold from his previous action for the rest of the film. This is where the movie begins to take off. It is as if everything else was a primer for the real conflict. I do not think a screenwriter usually thinks about escalating conflict in this way. The entire film, as one reviewer notes, is "a marvel of screen writing." The way in which conflict in this film segues from one level to another is genuinely inspiring; from family, to the politics of war, to the home.This is exactly what low budget films should aim to do. In a production aspect, they should be sure to please a small group of the audience, this I imagine being the European Union in this scenario, and in a story aspect they should resonate with meaning and life. The Dogma 95 style of films also seem to help accentuate and streamline the message.This is a kind of movie which hardly anyone goes to see grosses $300,000 in the U.S., and then fifteen years later, someone comes along, feels it's power, and remakes it in English. They would perhaps draw out everything, and add money to the production budget, and maybe make a small fortune. One critic has said that this was the "Deer hunter for the war on Terror." From what I cam remember, I personally think it is a stronger film.There really isn't much one can do, in my opinion, to make Brothers a better film. In fact, I can not think of a single thing, which makes me look naturally elsewhere for reasons for its narrow box office appeal, in America at least. It is true then what I have been reading about Americans' aversion to reading subtitles, heck, to reading anything for that matter, other than the Star and the Enquirer. God Bless Oprah, and Oprah's book club. Sometimes you have to be big to be noticed, and maybe, just maybe, if this film was in English, with a higher production budget, it would be up for an Academy Award. But most probably, it would be made with much less skill and sensitivity than the original, as we have seen countless times with other foreign films such as Ringu, and Insomia, I am told.