Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Four stagnant high school teachers decide to test out a theory that maintaining a constant level of intoxication will improve their overall lives.
Another Round is elevated above its premise by Mads Mikkelsen's extraordinary central performance and a genuinely singular tonal balance — melancholic and jubilant, comic and tragic all at once. The plot premise is clever and the execution disciplined, though the structural arc of rise-and-fall-and-rise follows a somewhat familiar trajectory. Cinematography is competent and naturalistic but not visually spectacular. Novelty is high: Vinterberg and co-writer Tobias Lindholm craft something unmistakably their own — the film's emotional register and philosophical curiosity feel utterly distinctive. The ending, with Mikkelsen's ecstatic dance sequence, is one of cinema's great recent closing images — euphoric, ambiguous, and deeply earned.