Jar City.

"A blockbuster in its native Iceland, adapted from Arnaldur Indridason's 2000 bestseller, this somber, sinewy police procedural by the talented actor-writer-director Baltasar Kormakur (The Sea) could pass for an episode of CSI: Reykjavik, only with less high-tech gimmickry, more pavement-pounding, and a head-clearing view of crime as anything but a cool diversion," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice.

The New York Times' AO Scott finds Jar City "intricate and pointed, conjuring a haunting, satisfying puzzle out of violence and chaos.... The emotions at the heart of this philosophical detective story are dark and tangled, like the grisly surprises that seem to be buried under every floorboard."

Updated through 3/3.

For Grady Hendrix, writing in the New York Sun, it's "incomprehensible" that it was such a hit at home, "mainly because it makes Icelanders look like a bunch of creeps... It's a sharp little thriller, but on the big screen, with its looming close-ups of every broken blood vessel, stained sweater, and yellowing tooth, it plays more like a horror movie."

"A 30-year-old brain in a jar ultimately functions as a key plot point, but it's also an apposite metaphor for Jar City itself, a film whose moral and sociological concerns are hemmed in both by obstructive aesthetic self-consciousness and genre clichés," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

"Kormákur gives signs of trying to rethink the genre, but he's starting too far down the line," writes Sam Adams at the AV Club. "Jar City makes a game try at building a new house from old lumber, but the rot is already in the wood."

"Miles away from the David Fincher school of by-the-numbers solutions, the movie finds its center in murky ambiguity," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press.

Earlier: David D'Arcy.

Update, 3/1: "[T]his is not just a fictional story about a couple who lose their four-year-old girl to a brain tumor, nor just a tale about the search for a murderer and his motive, but an intriguing blend of the two, overlaid by a Big Brother that takes the form of the nonfiction, controversial deCODE Genetics Inc, a company specializing in genetic research that, several years ago, received access to all medical files in the Icelandic government's database," writes Lauren Wissot at the House Next Door. "Jar City is so perfectly paced, taut and engrossing that you barely notice when the two stories seamlessly intertwine - at a sickly, yellow-lit, sci-fi spooky place called Jar City, the final resting place for the brains of the deceased. And this is also where the script becomes deftly, tightly twisted, with seemingly innocuous threads intricately woven through in unanticipated ways."

Update, 3/3: "Jar City is comic, disturbing and affecting by turns, and often all at the same time," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Tremendously acted and shot with memorable confidence, Jar City deserves a much wider release than it's apparently going to get."

Posted by dwhudson at February 29, 2008 8:43 AM