The Witch is just such a tremendously accomplished film. I mean, just, like, how it makes authentic 1600's talk sound natural is in of itself a miracle, much of it from child actors fer crissakes.
Speaking of old-timey settings, the extremely Norwegian medieval mini-epic The Last King has a great deal of scrappy charm and a surprisingly high amount of skiing in it. Like, actually more skiing related action sequences then the justly forgotten and likely future MST3K victim Extreme Ops did, which as I'm sure you'll all remember was about X-Games athletes battling terrorists on a mountain. But here its endearing and not flamboyantly stupid, and heck, maybe they really did ski that much in 1200's Norway, it sure looks like it would work well enough. There's also lots of arrow shooting, sword and axe fighting, and burly and near comically hirsute men cooing over an adorable infant, that infant being Norway's new King, who has to be ferreted off to safety, a situation that engenders the aforementioned skiing and violence and such. Its a good time, a modest adventure film that nails the basics and does well with its unique setting. Weirdly enough, this is the second solid-if-not-quite-spectacular Norwegian genre film I've seen this year (disaster pic The Wave from just a few months ago), good job Norway, keep this up and you'll displace Canada or Danny Trejo as my favored provider of B-pictures.
