Another Round (2020, Thomas Vinterberg) (Patreon)

59/100

Never actually saw Limitless, but for an hour or so this plays like my vague mental conception of that film (based entirely on the trailer), with booze substituted for whatever drug Bradley Cooper takes. Since male midlife crises tend to be tiresome, it's refreshing to see the subject tackled as a patently bogus scientific experiment, complete with drafts of an ostensible research paper; these guys' liberation via mild buzz is all the more fun for how cod-seriously they take it, sticking carefully to set hours and religiously monitoring their blood-alcohol levels. Even as I was enjoying watching them get their collective groove back, though, a little voice kept whispering "Are they eventually just gonna start drinking too much, at which point everything will go haywire? 'Cause that wouldn't be terribly interesting." The voice nagged at me, as I couldn't think of any other plausible outcome...and there wasn't one, turns out. They start drinking too much, at which point everything goes haywire, and that's not, in fact, terribly interesting—it's just The Lost Weekend x 4. Redeems itself somewhat with a superb finale that straddles the same nebulous border between freedom and oblivion as the ending of The Forest for the Trees; some critics appear to read it as entirely celebratory, but there's a reason why Vinterberg stages it at the water's edge, and his climactic freeze-frame (echoing a famous predecessor) is pretty darn explicit. While I've lately developed a certain resistance to this ploy (outside the context of a musical)—instant transcendence, just add dancing—Mikkelsen's frenetic, like-nobody's-watching routine is more Beau travail than Risky Business. Quasi-suicidal bliss.