Director Ole Christian Madsen began his career as an adherent to Dogme 95, the famous minimalist filmmaking movement began by fellow Danes Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. I haven't seen Madsen's previous two non-Dogme films, Nordkraft and Prague, but the remarkable, ultra-stylized Flame & Citron is about as far from the Dogme aesthetic as you can get and still have a movie. Perhaps not coincidentally, it's also one of the most exciting films I've ever seen at Telluride: bold, brave and one of a kind.

Flame & Citron tells the story of two heroes of the Danish resistance to the Nazi occupation, but it is far from your typical World War II period piece. Instead, it plays like some unholy, brilliant marriage between spy noir and comic book movie. Filled to the brim with assassination plots, double-crosses, larger-than-life villains, and big, dramatic gestures, this is not for viewers who like their movies timid and sedate. And under that grand façade, the film grapples with tough moral questions regarding war, occupation, survival, and ideology.

"Flame" and "Citron" are the code names for two Danish assassins who brazenly go after high-profile Danish turncoats and, increasingly, the occupying Germans themselves. ("Do they know what I look like?" asks Flame when he learns of a hefty bounty on his head. The response: "They know you're a redhead.") For them, the necessity of their work is an article of faith: the only moral response to occupation is to kill off the occupiers – and those who assist them – one by one. They take orders from an ornery police solicitor who claims to be in communication with the British. He hands them a name and a photograph, and off they go.

Hold onto your seats, folks: The summer movie season in Denmark is about to get even more thrilling. Flame & Citroen, a thriller set in Copenhagen during the World War II occupation by Nazi Germany, just became the biggest local hit in eight years. After eleven weeks in release, admissions have totaled 665,000, representing more than 10% of the country's entire population. What's so appealing?

Lead characters Flame (Thure Lindhardt) and Citroen (the great Mads Mikkelsen) are "legendary resistance fighters charged with liquidating Danish informers," according to the Danish Film Institute. Things heat up when Flame is ordered to execute his enigmatic girlfriend (Stine Stengade). The film is reportedly based on true events. All I can add is: the trailer at the Danish-language official site looks pretty freakin' good.

Here in America, our box office returns show that we're awash in aliens, predators, chipmunks, secrets and a self-made legend, but Swedish cinema lovers supported one of their own when it opened on Christmas Day. Variety reports that Arn: The Knight Templar has earned a robust $2.2 million in its first two days of release. That breaks down to a per-screen average of $10,821 at 207 engagements and is the "biggest opening ever" for a Swedish film in its homeland.

As I reported in August, Arn is the most expensive film and TV project ever made in Scandanavia, budgeted at $30 million to adapt the trilogy by Jan Guillou into two movies and a TV series. The books revolve around a fictional character forced into service as a Knight Templar during the Crusades. Variety says that local reviews "ranged from positive to negative with the majority falling somewhere in-between," but producer Valdemar Bergendahl gave the mixed reaction a positive spin: "It was expected. But I'm happy with all the copy that has been written about the film. It has shown what great interest there is in it." There's a good producer for you: any news is good news!

Arn will expand from Sweden and Norway into Denmark and Finland in the next two months, with the second feature film scheduled for release next fall. In the meantime, an international version will be stitched together from the two features; already it's been sold in 10 territories. With a cast that includes Stellan Skarsgård (Breaking the Waves), Mads Mikkelsen (After the Wedding), Vincent Perez (Queen Margot), Bibi Andersson (Persona), Simon Callow (A Room with a View) and Michael Nyqvist (Next Door), we'll wait to see if any US festivals or distributors display an interest.

It still doesn't have a title, and it still doesn't officially have a Bond girl, but according to Empire magazine, Bond 22 has found its villain. Of course, we don't know the character's name nor anything about him, except that he will be played by French actor Mathieu Amalric (Munich). The casting of Amalric was actually announced a few weeks ago by Fox News, but it couldn't be confirmed until Empire today got it out of the actor himself. He did hint at one loose detail about the movie, that it would be about childhood. Now, in the context of the quote, it actually appears that Amalric is saying that the desire to play a Bond villain stems from his childhood, but Empire understood his words differently, or at least spun them so that it seems like he said Bond 22 will focus on 007's childhood (as if James Bond Jr. and Agent Cody Banks weren't bad enough, now we may get a precocious young Bond). Empire also points out that Eva Green has dropped hints that Bond 22's villain will be her Casino Royale character's boyfriend, which would make sense now that we've heard Green will not appear in the next film, though photos of her character will.

This news would indicate that the Denver Post was wrong in claiming Robert Knepper would be playing the next Bond villain. Unless, of course, there's multiple bad guys -- a trend Hollywood has been a fan of lately. Either way, Amalric is an excellent choice to play the (or a) Bond baddie, and not just because he has that same foreign creepy look that Casino's Mads Mikkelsen has. The actor is receiving rave reviews for his starring role as a paralyzed sufferer of locked-in syndrome in Julian Schnabel's critically acclaimed new film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Fans of Amalric's need not worry that because of Bond 22 he will be more sought after for big Hollywood movies (as if any Bond villain actor ever was). The actor told Empire that taking the role is simply funny to him, it's not necessarily what he wants to do with his career and he will continue doing "very small French film[s] for free with [his] friends."

The fifth and final 2006 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film finally arrives in American theaters, and it's a serious case of too little, too late. Susanne Bier's After the Wedding, from Denmark, is fairly middlebrow and melodramatic, not as bloody awful as Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory or Deepa Mehta's Water, but equally unmemorable. It's a testament to how badly the Academy needs to revamp this category: instead of taking a single submission from each of a list of countries, why not simply nominate the best foreign language films that played in American theaters during a calendar year? That way we could have enjoyed such nominees as Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times, Claude Chabrol's The Bridesmaid, Park Chan-wook's Lady Vengeance, Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Patrice Chéreau's Gabrielle, or perhaps even Jean-Pierre Melville's resurrected 1969 film Army of Shadows.

Fortunately, there's another reason for After the Wedding to exist, and that's the unique and charismatic star Mads Mikkelsen, with his impossibly pointy cheekbones, beady eyes and reptilian lips that look as if they're about to slide right off his face. In this country, he's best known as James Bond's nemesis in Casino Royale, or as Clive Owen's scrungy sidekick in King Arthur (2004), basically a sadistic badass. But in his native Denmark, he's capable of all kinds of things, from black comedies (Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, The Green Butchers) to weepy melodrama (Open Hearts). After the Wedding definitely falls into the latter category (otherwise, it wouldn't have been an Oscar nominee).

Two weeks ago, Cinematical received an invitation to a two-day press bonanza for Casino Royale. Events would kick off with a Sunday evening cocktail party and screening, followed by a day of round-robin interviews at a swank Park Avenue hotel, with catered breakfast and lunch. We want our readers to know that in order to safeguard our journalistic integrity, we politely declined all the free food and booze, except for a comp hotdog at the screening. Almost every notable from the film, with the exception of Judi Dench, turned up for the question/answer roundtables. Daniel Craig, the controversial choice to re-launch the Bond character, was there. So was the unnervingly beautiful French actress Eva Green, who plays Ian Fleming's first Bond girl, Vesper Lynd. Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, who was plucked from obscurity to play the film's snake-like villain, Le Chiffre, was also on hand. So was Italian beauty Caterina Murino, who plays a more traditional Bond girl in the film.

Director Martin Campbell, returning for his second Bond film after Goldeneye, and the series' longtime producer Barbara Broccoli, were also in attendance. The following is a sampling of the endless questions and answers bandied about on that day. Please note that it contains every possible spoiler about Casino Royale -- who lives, who dies, the ending, what will happen in the next film, etc ... if you want to be surprised, stop reading now.

Daniel Craig

Cinematical: Barbara Broccoli has implied that she felt Die Another Day was over-the-top. Is that something you personally want to avoid as you go forward with these films? "All I'm concerned about is that we cast the right people in the roles. As for being over the top, I mean for Christ's sakes, Mads weeps blood. That's quite over the top. But it's great because it's a beautiful Bond moment. It's done with a dab. I want it to be as stylish as it possibly can. You can do anything. If it's in the plot, you can do anything. If it's right and it feels good and it's not there because it's self-consciously there. We're in a fantasy world. This isn't real life."

Shot with a handheld camera, Prague is a film of faces. The majority of images are extreme close-ups of such intimacy that only parts of the faces are visible. Eyes and a nose, perhaps. Or a mouth and chin. Sometimes just eyes -- worn, exhausted eyes. The story of a disintegrating marriage, Prague pays such relentless attention to every look exchanged and each breath taken by the husband and wife that we, too, find ourselves seeking out meaning in the smallest actions and most insignificant exchanges. The film is one of those raw, heart-breaking stories of loss that we watch half-hoping it will fail and leave us emotionally whole. Thanks to the efforts of director Ole Christian Madsen and his cast, though, the searingly powerful Prague succeeds magnificently.

As the film opens, Christoffer (convincingly portrayed by Mads Mikkelsen) and his wife Maja (Stine Stengade) travel from their home in Denmark to Prague, to sign the papers required to get Christoffer's recently deceased father's body released from the morgue, and to arrange for the coffin to be sent back to Denmark to be buried in the family plot. The 42-year-old Christoffer has seen his father once since he left the family thirty years before, and is matter-of-factly disgusted by what he sees as the man's willful neglect. He goes through the motions of claiming the body without emotion, and is intent on getting the necessary paperwork filled out as quickly as possible.

Frank (Kim Bodnia), the protagonist of Nicolas Winding Refn's debut feature Pusher, was a likable everyman who also happened to be a drug dealer in a lot of trouble. In that film, Frank's associate and sometime-friend Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen, soon to be seen as Le Chiffre in Casino Royale) seemed to be a bird of a different feather: His shaved head (complete with "RESPECT" tattooed across its back), lithe body and careless attitude suggested a man who wanted to be seen as a tough customer -- someone to be feared. In reality, though, Tonny was more interested in drinking with his friends and talking about sex than actually taking part in the violent, dangerous life that surrounded him. Despite his efforts to the contrary, he looked more like a naïve kid out for adventure than he did a hardened criminal.

In Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands, Tonny is forced to the foreground, and proves himself to be both more and less than he seemed. In the years between the two films, Tonny has grown from a scrawny, energetic kid into a strangely vacant adult, completely lost within his own life. The movie opens with him on the receiving end of a jailhouse monologue about how fear is the only thing that separates those who run the world from the sorry masses; once fear is conquered, one can do anything. Tonny listens blankly, the relevance of the story lost on him. Instead of comprehending what he hears, he simply stares until the speaker mentions the money Tonny owes him. Because the man knows and respects Tonny's father -- known to everyone as the Duke -- he's willing to work with Tonny to pay back the debt. Otherwise, he would not be so kind. The problem is solved when Tonny, clearly at his debtor's bidding, starts a prison-yard fight that results in him being outnumbered and badly beaten. Though Tonny's initial attack was brave, his wild flight afterwards was not; his fear remains firmly in control.

Originally released nearly a decade ago in its native Denmark, Pusher is a breathtaking film. Planned as an independent, no-budget feature by director Nicolas Winding Refn, the project changed shape when Balboa Films offered him financing: Gone are the 16mm film and the amateur actors, replaced by vivid color and seasoned professionals. What remains, however, is Refn's sensibility, and the resulting work -- his feature debut as a director -- is an enthralling combination of the shocking, the sensational and the matter-of-fact.

Pusher tells the story of a terrible week in the life of Frank (Kim Bodnia), a small-time drug dealer. When times are good, Frank spends almost all of his time with Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen), his right-hand man and apparent best friend; Tonny is the classic street tough who looks much harder -- manic grin, "RESPECT" tattooed on the back of his shaved head -- than he acts. On the best of days, the two drive around laughing, talking about women and selling drugs to people so beaten-down they live in terror of displeasing Frank and Tonny; on the worst days, there is bloodshed, fear and betrayal. As the week begins, the friends go about their everyday business, doing deals here and there and traveling the city like care-free kids, joking and taking real pleasure in their mutual friendship. In addition to working as a unit, the two party together as well, boozing with the same good-humored grumbling that helps them through the day.

Her name is Green...Eva Green. This time the rumors turned out to be true after Casino Royale producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli (why do I love that name so much?) officially proclaimed today that Eva Green will play the next Bond girl, Vesper Lynd. It's been a wild 24 hours over at Bond camp, having just announced yesterday that Mads Mikkelsen had snagged the role of the evil Le Chiffre, prompting writers like to me to start caring again. Jeffrey Wright fans can high-five one another because the actor has also signed on to play Felix Leiter.

But who is Eva Green? {Cue theme song from The Dating Game} Well, she's 26 years old and was born in Paris, France. She's a former Emporio Armani model and can be seen in films like Kingdom of Heaven and The Dreamers. Eva has a twin sister named Joy and her father is a Swedish dentist. Oh, and she's beautiful. Wilson and Broccoli supported the casting choice today by saying, "We are thrilled that Eva and Mads have joined the cast of 'Casino Royale' completing a first rate international cast. They bring exceptional talent to the characters Ian Fleming described so vividly in his first James Bond novel."