Kapringen 2012

A.O. Scott, New York Times: Lindholm turns tedium and frustration into agonizing suspense. Read more

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: It's an unshowy, quietly intense drama with grace notes in every scene -- and a hellish punch. Read more

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: This feature film shows how much tension, telling detail and sheer dramatic expertise can be squeezed into a running time of less than two hours. Read more

John Hartl, Seattle Times: Lindholm justifies his confidence in a visual approach that's refreshingly realistic. Read more

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, AV Club: A compact, meticulously researched drama about the business end of maritime piracy. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: It's the second feature from the young writer-director Tobias Lindholm, and it showcases his gift for tightly focused stories told without an ounce of fat. Read more

J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: Gripping and tightly focused. Read more

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: Lindholm doesn't present the film as a procedural for hostage negotiations because he knows too well that there are too many movable parts, too many things that can go wrong. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: This isn't an action picture; it's a picture about the suspense and terror of inaction. Read more

Jordan Hoffman, Film.com: A frustratingly realistic take on the modern threat of piracy. Read more

Neil Young, Hollywood Reporter: A high-seas hostage-taking and resulting negotiations are absorbingly dramatized in this low-key Venice standout from Denmark's hottest new writer-director. Read more

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: "A Hijacking" is as lean, focused and to the point as its title. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: We're impatient for action, any kind of action - but preferably the sort that involves a team of Navy SEALs, maybe led by Dwayne Johnson. Instead, we get something like a merger meeting. Read more

Ella Taylor, NPR: A Hijacking is the story of two men and their fate, but in its unassuming, specific way, it's also about global capitalism and its fallout. Read more

Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News: Well-made, skillfully acted and utterly grueling to sit through. Read more

Farran Smith Nehme, New York Post: Hand-held camerawork, so often a confounded nuisance, here makes the conditions on board the Rozen feel nauseatingly urgent. Read more

Michael Sragow, Orange County Register: This absorbing chronicle of a hijacking in the Indian Ocean has the strengths of the best procedural dramas -- it assumes a distanced and objective tone and packs an emotional wallop. Read more

Tirdad Derakhshani, Philadelphia Inquirer: A Hijacking is one of those perfect films that crop up every few years to prove that with true artistry, even the most exhausted genre can yield something new, rich, and strange. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: No mainstream American thriller could ever be made about this subject that resisted simple-minded narrative cliches the way "A Hijacking" does, or that refused to depict its characters as either heroes or villains. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: Methodical and tense ... has the feel of something based on real-life events ... boils down to an arresting portrait of two men, with different backgrounds and abilities, doing everything they can not to break. Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Lindholm rations the meat and potatoes of plot to keep us captive at the bargaining table. It's a sadistic ploy that produces a real payoff. Read more

Geoff Pevere, Globe and Mail: A nail-biter of a thriller that eschews conventional thrills, Tobias Lindholm's verite-like tale of a Danish cargo ship hijacked by Somali pirates is rivetingly low-key. Read more

Bruce Demara, Toronto Star: A finely spun tale that eschews sensationalism to focus on the human toll on the captives, their families and their employers back home. Read more

Cath Clarke, Time Out: From this classy hostage movie, we learn how to negotiate with Somali pirates, and - perhaps more usefully - how to do male public displays of affection, Scandi-style. Read more

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: Tobias Lindholm's starkly commanding thriller cuts out all the action heroics usually associated with hostage movies, replacing them with an underlying, nauseating sense of dread; it's a nail-biter about being under the gun. Read more

Guy Lodge, Variety: Tobias Lindholm's superb [film] actually grows more chillingly subdued as its nightmare scenario unfolds. Read more

Stephanie Zacharek, Village Voice: Through it all, A Hijacking maintains its cinematic grandeur, balancing the open-sky thrill of being at sea with the claustrophobia that comes with being forced below deck for days at a time. Read more

Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post: To refuse to call A Hijacking a thriller is not to say it isn't thrilling, in a dryly cerebral way. Read more