At Ellen's Age (2010)

Im Alter von Ellen

2010 | Germany | Pia Marais | ★★★

Kept afloat by Jeanne Balibar's strong central performance, Pia Marais's mildly diverting, sporadically stimulating At Ellen's Age is a German existential coming-of-middle-age drama, featuring unpredictable plotting and abstruse characterisation.

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"Ellen (Jeanne Balibar) is a flight attendant edging into middle age who is growing disenchanted with her job and gets a wake-up call about her love life when her boyfriend Florian (Georg Friedrich) informs her he's been sleeping with another woman -- who is soon to make him a father. Florian proposes that he, Ellen and the other woman could all live together, which Ellen doesn't agree with. Ellen walks away from her job. With no idea of what she wants to do with herself, Ellen almost randomly falls in with a radical animal rights group and embraces a new life of political action, drugs and free love. Has Ellen truly embraced a new life, or is she simply reacting to her anger over what happened to the old one?" IMDb

Dag (2010-15)

2010-15 | Norway | Øystein Karlsen | ★★★★

Øystein Karlsen's Dag is a bleak but riotously funny Norwegian comedy series, comprised of a heady mix of outré black humour, surprising moments of tenderness, and a decidedly dark worldview, driven by the strangely loveable performances of Atle Antonsen, Tuva Novotny, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Agnes Kittelsen, and Rolf Lassgård.

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"Dag is a Norwegian comedy series about a marriage counselor who thinks people should live in solitude. He hates spending time with other people, except from his friend Benedict who is struggling to be faithful in his own relationship. Dag's life changes when his well-meaning sister, Marianne, forces him to go on his nineteenth blind-date with her old childhood friend, Eva." IMDb

See also: 

Stotty's Norwegian Favourites

Nokas (2010)

2010 | Norway | Erik Skjoldbjærg | ★★★★★

Recreating Norway's largest ever robbery with documentary-like authenticity, Erik Skjoldbjærg's remarkable Nokas is a powerful, electrifyingly authentic-feeling true-life crime drama, packed to the brim with authoritative detail and unshowy performances.

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"The movie portrays Norway's most spectacular robbery, where 11 men occupied central Stavanger for twenty minutes and escaped with 57 million kroner (appx $10 million). A police officer was shot and killed. The robbery itself is the main character of the story, and it is illuminated from several angles in the course of the film, from the perspective of the police, the robbers, the central cash service personnel, and ordinary people. It's a credible and realistic, but fictitious reconstruction, the way it could have happened. The story is poetically and filmatically depicted, with sober use of various genre techniques." IMDb


See also:

Stotty's Norwegian Favourites
Stotty's 2010s Favourites

Date Night (2010)

2010 | USA | Shawn Levy | ★★

Starring Tina Fey and Steve Carell, Shawn Levy's disappointing Date Night is a very mildly diverting, not-as-funny-as-it-should-be, one-crazy-night comedy, featuring fine performances and memorable cameos, but not all that many laughs.

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"Claire and Phil Foster (Tina Fey and Steve Carell) are a typical suburban couple whose lives – including their weekly date nights of dinner and a movie – have become routine. To reignite the marital spark, they visit a trendy Manhattan bistro where a case of mistaken identity turns their evening into the ultimate date night-gone-awry. But as Claire and Phil take their unexpected walk on the wild side, they begin to remember what made them so special together." 20th Century Fox