A besotted cinematic sub-genre consists of films about drinking — liquor, bars and the imbiber’s life. Whether the lives portrayed are rowdy and boisterous ones, or, as is often the case, destructively out-of-control, these films — ranging from Days of Wine and Roses and The Lost Weekend to Leaving Las Vegas — usually map their character arcs alongside their characters’ physical and social deterioration; they wind up as cautionary tales. A recent film that took a different approach is the Ross Brothers’s hybrid documentary, Bloody Noses Empty Pockets, which captured the woozy exuberance of one intoxicated day/night while not eliding […]

A Hijacking, Tobias Lindholm’s first feature as a solo director (his first film, 2010’s prison drama R, was co-directed with Michael Noer) begins before its title event, with cargo ship cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbæk) calling home to his wife, and it ends after it’s all over. But the bulk of the film is a two-setting procedural, radiating verisimilitude both on-board and in the corporate offices, where a CEO (Søren Malling) personally conducts negotiations with hijackers. During an interview with Filmmaker, Lindholm spoke about the production in all its preparatory and practical aspects. Filmmaker: When I heard the sound of the […]