Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

robert-temple-1 This is a ten episode edge-of-your-seat Danish thriller series. It was written by the same team who wrote BORGEN (2010, see my review), so it was bound to be good, and it is indeed spectacularly good. The complex and interweaving story lines centre upon massive corporate fraud in the wind energy industry. There certainly is a good deal of that, as I know from direct experience of it. 'Green' campaigners who push for wind energy often get secret financial commissions from the wind turbine companies for each turbine sold as a result of their 'idealistic' lobbying, so the environmental movement is seriously corrupt. I myself was asked to join in such schemes and was shocked at the huge sums being paid under the table to environmental activists posing as pure idealists. So I did not need any convincing that the central plot of this series was realistic. The energy company at the centre of the drama is called Energreen, and its CEO is an ambiguously charming figure played expertly by Nikolaj Lie Kaas, who also appeared as Mathias Borch in THE KILLING (2012, see my review). He is a mixture of idealistic fervour combined with psychotic ruthlessness. He doesn't hesitate for a moment to have someone who is getting in his way murdered. The basic corruption technique of Energreen is to set up shell companies in multiple offshore jurisdictions who successively buy wind farms from each other at higher and higher prices, thus pumping up the supposed values of the wind farms in preparation for a float of the main company at a vastly inflated value. But the shell companies are all secretly owned by Energreen, so Energreen is continually buying assets from itself with borrowed money and pumping up all the values to fantasy levels artificially, and then faking the prospectuses to investors by claiming that the artificial values are genuine. Side by side with this, Energreen also claims to be on the verge of perfecting a revolutionary technique to transmit power over large distances without loss by using superconductivity. I almost fell off my seat when someone in the series suddenly mentioned the Meissner Effect. With a shock I realized that the script writers must have consulted a scientist. Walther Meissner discovered the Effect named after him in 1933, but only experts have ever heard of it. It describes how a magnetic field is expelled from a charged current when it becomes superconducting. Kaas keeps telling investors and everyone in the company that his mysterious subsidiary in Poland, which operates in complete secrecy, is on the verge of perfecting superconducting power transmission (at ambient temperature, i.e. not requiring cooling to super-low temperatures.) This is all of course a fraud, and nothing of the kind is really happening, although Kaas is so deluded that he has convinced himself that maybe it will 'one day'. This is pretty sophisticated stuff for a TV series plot line. As it happens, in the real world, room temperature superconductivity has been demonstrated to exist and was first discovered in the 1970s. It happens inside our bodies, for instance, at the micro level. Freeman Cope published many technical papers about this before his mysterious early death. Information about this subject has largely been suppressed since the seventies by a combination of business, security, and military interests, using secrecy agreements and other methods. Consequently, only a tiny number of people are aware of this. There is no doubt that huge efforts are indeed being made to exploit room temperature superconductivity at the macro scale for industrial uses, such as the frictionless transmission of power over huge distances without loss passionately advocated by the fraudster Kaas. Indeed, the transmission of both positive and negative currents over astronomical distances takes place all the time in outer space by means of filamentary structures known as Birkeland Currents, named in honour of Kristian Birkeland, who first proposed them more than a century ago as the means of the Aurora Borealis being produced by currents from the Sun. I do not wish this review to turn into a physics lecture, but it is important to stress that this TV series has a serious grounding in advanced technological thinking, and has clearly had a scientific adviser of some kind, or at least has been based on some proper research by the script writers. The other main character in the series is the company lawyer named Claudia, played by Natalie Madueno. She manages to make the character fascinating, through her mixture of sensitivity and insensitivity, her apparent softness merely concealing a ruthlessness as great as that of her boss, Kaas. Both main characters are thus astonishingly successful studies of morally ambiguous people who have quietly gone over the edge into madness, and who are running a giant corporation. Well, nothing could be more realistic than that! Even the most remote backwoods person by now knows that most of the world's giant corporations are run by just such people. They are members of 'the international power elite' against which the world's population is now rebelling, an early sign of which was the election of Modi in India, and the latest example being the election of Trump in America. And we can be sure they they are just the beginning. This series therefore has a great deal to teach us, and is not merely entertainment. It also has a powerful sub-plot of two young yobs who are car thieves, and who become mixed up in an inextricable way with the corrupt dealings of the people they do not even know. And the third main character is an admirable policeman who will not give up trying to expose the corruption, played by Thomas Bo Larsen with a quiet manner which is powerfully effective. There is also a sub-plot involving his irritating and faithless wife who has multiple sclerosis and is having an affair with her doctor. This is a fantastic series, which should definitely not be missed.

Bene Cumb This decade has brought along so many strong Scandinavian dramas that it is often difficult to keep track and make distinctions - partially also due to the limited number of performers filling out major/important roles... The same applies to Bedrag, where modern "coryphaeuses" like Nikolaj Lie Kaas as Alexander Sødergren and Thomas Bo Larsen as Mads take part, but many smaller roles are also performed by many otherwise having bigger roles in famous series. Still, the two mentioned are not dominating too much, every character has its significance, and all in all, a solid cast is formed, to be widely followed and noticed.True, a good series emanates from the plot, and it is pleasantly versatile; focusing on e.g. financial crimes only would have made the plot more arid and specific, not for wider audience, but inclusion of a punisher and petty thieves has provided thrilling and even some amusing moments, enabling to "freshen up" from sophisticated economic relations and terms. The ending is also many-featured, probably not satisfactory per se, but evidently more realistic as not all wrongdoers are caught and/or sentenced in real world.Although the Season 1 had its somewhat clear - but not full-scale - end, I have read that Season 2 will follow. Good news, I will definitely watch it as well.

Tom Dooley Energreen is a company that is tipped to be a leading player in the renewable energies market. Headed by a young, charismatic go getter in the shape of Alexander Sødergren. They are looking to expand even further and hopefully float the stock too for a great mound of cash. The thing is when a thing is too good to be true then it usually isn't.So when things start to unravel they have alternative tactics to close things down. This can mean paying off the culprits or maybe not. We have the parallel story of the fraud squad, the cops and a mechanic who all get involved in the goings on at this ever so green company. It is a web of intrigue where no prisoners are ever going to be taken.Now this is Danish so falls nicely into the Nordic Noir genre of which I am a big fan. This has all the usual things you would expect in terms of a high calibre production and excellent acting. Thomas Bo Larsen as Mads, the police lead, is simply superb as the driven man but with marital strife and other problems. The full cast though are all exceptional. I really enjoyed this, so much so that I put off watching the final episode for a torturous three days – finally saw it last night and it keeps the guessing going till the final scene – seriously recommended.

Christopher Wilson "Follow The Money" is a Danish Crime/Thriller set in the cut throat world of big finance, more specifically in renewable energies. The show follows Mads (Thomas Bo Larsen) and his fraud squad who are of the belief that something is seriously wrong with the energy firm Energreen. His fears are confirmed when lawyer Claudia (Natalie Madueno) uncovers all is not seems on the surface.Another Norsk export that hits the ground running, whatever they seem to touch over there currently just turns to gold. While this is of a very different vein to our previously reviewed "Trapped" this one comes from a different calibre of director, this time around the show was developed and directed by different people the show was developed by Jeppe Gjervig Gram, Jannik Tai Mosholt,with direction by Per Fly. Fly has recently signed on to direct "Backstabbing for Beginners" starring Theo James and Ben Kingsley of which he wrote and is directing. Fly does extremely well to create tension in a subject that from the outside would struggle to interest the everyday man, it's a very high-class area of a high-class sector. I knew little to nothing and still don't about the finance sector, but that didn't stop the tension from feeling real and being able to bring me to my seats edge on many occasions.Another stellar cast in a Nordic television show should come as no surprise to anybody who has watched a since episode in any of the shows. The acting across the border is wonderful again, with stand out performances from Thomas Bo Larsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas, two very contrasting characters that play so well off each other in this cut throat world. Along with supporting characters the casting is spot on as usual, resulting in performances to rival the "big TV" you see over here in the UK or over in the US.The plot twists and turns in attempts to throw the viewer that seem to come a little more often than is necessary do their job well to keep you drawn in to what is going on with Evergreen. The main issue that show seemed to have was the pacing was far too slow, it can be seen what they were trying to do with a slow burn to bring you into the world, but it kind of served as a wedge that ends up to an extent alienating the viewer. The constant use of hooks to keep you coming back each episode aren't as necessary as the show-runners would like, to the point at which some of the hooks are noticeable before an episode ends. This does little to take away from the enjoyment of the show it just felt unnecessary as if they were worried the story as a whole wouldn't entice viewers but it does.Overall, the show is a good thrill ride in the world of big finance, chalked full of great acting performances and wonderfully shot cinematography which is expected with shows of this nature. If you have even a miniscule interest in the subject at question or the current flock of television shows coming out of the Nordic countries then this is definitely one for you, alternatively if you're new to this area of TV this is a great stepping stone to other shows like "Trapped" or "The Bridge". Another enjoyable show to sink your teeth into that will keep you highly entertained throughout the 10 episode run, I will certainly be keeping my eye on Nordic Noir & Beyond releases in the coming weeks, months and years to come.