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Another one of those small Euro digital films that explores human emotion so much better than the mega-bucks equivalents from the States.

When a loving couples unity is shattered by a horrific road accident that cripples the boyfriend, the story explores how a moment can destroy a lifetime or create alternate paths. Superbly acted with deep pathos and unflinching torment, I have yet to see a better performance this year of a female lead. You leave the cinema questioning how the happiest moment in your life can be stolen in a blink of an eye. Life is fragile and all too brief. Not a minute should be wasted.

We are living in a Golden Age concerning Danish films. One didn't think Susanne Bier would get into the Dogma genre, but there she is now.

This is really good. There's a loving couple, where the man is badly hurt in a car accident and becomes lame, with all the complications, also sexually of course, this means. It wasn't the driver's fault, but she feels guilty and her husband tries to comfort the girl. But the comfort goes much too far.

This is about big feelings, but Bier leads you right into them, without rushing away from you. The acting is absolutely brilliant, especially the plain virtuosity from Paprika Steen and Mads Mikkelsen. I've seen more than 50 films this year, but this might be the best one. Strongly recommended!

A girl whose boyfriend went paraplegic because of a car crash falls in love with the husband of the woman that ran her fiancée over. Though the plot may look like a twisted soap opera the fact is that the movie of Akeson & Olesen is such an intense and wise portrait of human emotions. Feeling of guilt, love, infidelity... no flowery stuff and no useless decorations. "Open hearts" is a piece of life.

Despite the directors probe to know their job their movie wouldn't be the same without the impressive work of the extraordinary actors she chose. Propably none of them will won an Oscar, and they're not very popular, but they'd deserve to be big stars.

Another great contribution of DOGMA movement to last decade's cinema.

*My rate: 9/10

Halfway through Open Hearts, it becomes more obvious that you're watching a fictional account. The plot becomes slightly predictable, which is a good thing. For the most part, this new Danish film feels like a reality documentary and pulls you in like reality itself. Director Susanne Bier follows the technical requirements to earn a Dogme 95 certification, which means the film has to be devoid of any unnatural camera movement, lighting and sound among other rules. As a result, Open Hearts is also devoid of superficial movie cliches and full of heartfelt human situations.

The film follows a young, newly?engaged couple and a married couple with kids, whose lives are interrupted and complicated by a road accident. Bier stays clear of the external effects of the drama and instead focuses on the characters' inner effects. Her protagonists lose emotional control and appear ill?equipped to handle the consequences of an unexpected tragedy. The film's appeal is not only universal, but timely as well, shattering the modern belief that everything is controllable. Once tragedy strikes, our lives seem far more fragile than we thought.

Stephan Paschalides

Dogme movement (1995-2005) is a terra incognita for me, although now it has officially existed only as a terminology thanks to the ubiquitous evasion of shooting on location with any cellphones or other hand-held lighter gizmos, and its spirit has been ingested by more advanced mutants (e.g. mumblecore). But Susanne Bier is not merely a Dogme enthusiast, AFTER THE WEDDING (2006 7/10) is a redoubtable relationship dissection and OPEN HEARTS (the new Hannibal Mads Mikkelsen star in both films) treads the same territory to examine the complexity of humans' conundrum between desire and responsibility, ethics and emotions.

Two couples, one is engaged, another has 3 children, a car accident (not entirely abides by the Dogme rules though) turns their worlds upside down, a threat is common-or-garden both in the cinematic and real world; the life-changing mishap prompts an adultery between a middle class doctor and the disheartened fiancée, whose fiancé undergoes a permanent quadriplegia from the car accident where the doctor's wife is the offender.

The face-fixated close-ups extensively put those characters under scrutiny for their rational and irrational behaviors, natural light commingles with saturated palette (during the beginning and the ending) and a black & white lens of the blurry and grainy illusory fancy. The cast is sterling, a quartet of tug-of-war from Mikkelsen, Richter, Lie Kass and Steen, a humdrum-weary family man holds his seven-year-itch infatuation to a damsel-in-distress; a comfort-seeker with abiding guilt of abandoning her bed-ridden fiancé; a young paralyzer who ruthlessly deserts his fiancée for his incompetence as a proper man but still hankers for her company; a wife is rueful of her road rage and its tragic repercussions, suddenly devastated by her husband's utter betrayal; Steen's impromptu slapping and Mikkelsen's reaction are among the best on-screen intensified scenes I have even seen, three of the four leads end up in my yearly top 10 list (guess who narrowly missed the spot?).

But on the other hand, the melodramatic core of the story hobbles a soul-searching catharsis and empathetic introspection which would put the film onto an upper notch, Bier and DP Morten Søborg's camera is erratic but not dizzily shaky, the fly-on-the-wall intimacy allows us to take a much closer look at the symptoms and the cause of the frailty resides in every soul on earth, and offers us staying in a paralleled world, munches with palliative pills to ease our own troubles.