In a Better World – review

This well-acted, well-made Danish movie was the unexpected winner of the latest Oscar for best foreign language movie in a year that saw such films submitted as the French Of Gods and Men , the Algerian Outside the Law and the Thai Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives . It's a highly schematic piece about violence, bullying, pacifism and turning the other cheek that begins with the experience of two 11-year-old, middle-class lads from troubled families successfully confronting their classroom tormentor. This encourages them to seek revenge on a xenophobic psychopath after the father of one of them refuses to retaliate following a mild but humiliating assault. The father is a Swedish doctor on leave from a refugee camp in Africa who is sorely provoked when a sadistic local warlord, with a reputation for mutilating and murdering, comes in for an operation. The movie holds your attention, but you leave discussing the manipulative plot rather than the moral issues it raises.