There’s no escaping it, the year is drawing to a close, winter’s pretty much here and nauseating Christmas tunes will soon infiltrate your televisions, car radios and shopping arcades.
The last bastion against the tinsel tsunami is an island known as Halloween. Reach for it now, despite it being two more weeks away, for it’s the last fun you’ll have this year. It’s becoming increasingly popular in Denmark and everyone knows that suicides in Scandinavia skyrocket at Christmas …
Copenhagen cinemas will obligingly help to get you in the mood, starting with Annabelle (see this week’s review), the month’s second big horror release following Dracula Untold, which was reviewed last issue and is still on general release.
Parents grappling with half-term hell can turn to Cinemateket’s The World’s Best Children’s Film program to keep their adorable brood busy with such holiday-appropriate classics as the beloved horromedy Ghostbusters (Saturday 14.15) and Joe Dante’s enduring creature feature Gremlins (Tuesday 14.30) – see dfi.dk/Filmhuset for details.
Staying with Cinemateket, Danish on a Sunday, its bi-monthly screenings of Danish films with English subtitles, this weekend presents Catch The Dream by Anne-Grethe Bjarup Riis – a family drama from last year that centres around a famous Danish racehorse called Tarok that dominated the trots in the 1970s. The film starts at 14.15 and an extra 40kr will get you coffee and a pastry.
Over at Huset, there’s the usual eclectic mixed bag: primarily a three-part series entitled Literary Rebels with films dedicated to the likes of Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. There’s an evening of intriguing shorts made by North Korean defectors (Tuesday 19.30) and, as part of the Spanish Cinema series, you can see Voyage To Nowhere – a comedy drama about a group of comic actors wandering the Spanish countryside in search of a paying gig (Wednesday 19.00, 50kr). All the details are at huset-kbh.dk
I’ll be back next week with more cinema. Until then, try not to think about Christmas. (MW)