Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Siflutter It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

magda_butra Pigeon is made in the same style as You, the Living. Again we have plenty of short scenes, shot from one angle, with no cuts. Filled with absurdity, no actual plot, various way of interpretation. Too deep or too obvious, Andersson bounces between two extremes. The characters and the scenes are overdrawn. Everything happens in one, slow pace. Silence is boring and dulling the vigilance. In comparison, You, the Living seemed more... lively.If Andersson shows Swedish society, I felt the criticism towards it in one scene, mocking it in the second and a direct reference to it in the third. The critique is present in a scene with elderly elegant Swedes observing the cruelty, done by non-Sweden. For me this is a reflection on Swedish neutrality in the 20th century. Mocking the Swedish society appears in the last scene. Bunch of people is waiting at the bus stop and one of the men starts to ask if today it's really Wednesday, cause for him it felt like Thursday. The group assures him that yes indeed, it's Wednesday. Additionally, the other man explains, that we all have to agree that it's Wednesday, otherwise there's gonna be chaos. Of course the first man did not imply that we wished it's another day of the week or that he is still gonna pretend it's not Wednesday. It did not hinder the other man to make sure that everything is clear - even if you feel like something else, you have to agree with everyone else in order to keep peace and organization. It might be exaggerated reference to Jantelagen (no one is special, no one should act like they are superior to one another). It is established that it's Wednesday, everyone has to adjust.And then it's my favourite scene with Charles XII. He, as a Swedish king, should be a clear indicator that Andersson tells something about Sweden. Okay, we have a king with absolute power, everyone serves him even if he has the most ridiculous demands. But... this could be any monarch, right? So for me by using him, the director was more about praising the modernization, understood both as moving from kingdoms to democracy and as equalization of the societies. Choosing Charles XII could simply just give Andersson space to mock king's homosexual needs, which was directly shown. Despite different possible interpretations, I admire Andersson for the technical management of this scene. It's the longest one in the movie and the most complicated. So many elements could go wrong and in the end there is this final version with no cut. Standing ovation.What if we look at Pigeon not as a portrait of Swedish life, but a life itself? All the feelings are phlegmatic. Even love, even anger, even laughter. Is the life so unfair or do we make it this way ourselves? I think that Swedish societ" is just a frame. Andersson is using some obvious cliches and stereotypes (which still can be true!) about his motherland in order to explain something more, something common to all human beings. Or I'm just trying to find deeper meaning which really isn't there. If so, this is just another proof of this director's strength - his movies can be seen through so many shades of interpretation.

Doctor_Phil People have been duped into thinking that a film is realistic if each thing in it, taken by itself, is realistic. But the selection and assemblage into a whole is what makes a film, and Roy Andersson's selection is not a realistic look at life. It is a relentless montage of death and despair. Life is better than this.In context, it is just another dreary product of the post-modernist highbrow elite trying to convince the masses that their lives aren't worth living, in the hopes that they will destroy their culture so that they, the elite, can build a new utopia on its ashes.(Also, it's extremely boring. If Andersson had eliminated all of the disconnected scenes, including most of the ones at the start of the film, it would just be boring, which would be a great improvement.)

runamokprods The last part of Andersson's brilliant, loose 'trilogy about being a human being' ("Songs from the Second Floor" was the 1st part. "You, The Living" the 2nd) -- Although there's no need to have seen the earlier films to appreciate this one, since there's no overlap of character or even story, just style, mood and theme.This film re-visits Andersson's unique, hysterically funny and sometimes tragic world view, and his utterly original style. Andersson's camera never moves, never cuts within a scene. He finds a great frame, and the image sits there while his sad-sack characters, usually wearing ultra-pale make up like psychotic clowns, or silent movie comics, go through whatever bizarre silliness Andersson has devised. The locations are never real, but are always elaborate, and frequently breathtaking, sets, adding to the comic-nightmare feel.There are a few characters who reappear through the film, like the two desperate novelty salesmen peddling vampire fangs and a hideous 'Uncle One-Tooth' mask 'they have great faith in' -- giving off a distinctly 'Waiting for Godot' vibe. But there's nothing like an overall story. Just a series of blackly comic vignettes... that slowly add up in a generally thematic way.Andersson has a magical ability to be 'Monty Python' level funny (or, perhaps given his slower pace 'Monty Python' on downers), until suddenly it isn't funny – for a moment, or a scene – and you realize how sad it is underneath, as Andersson shows us the cruelty that humans are capable of, especially those with money or power, and the desperation that most of the rest of us live with, before going back to his grandly comic surreal hi-jinks.No one else makes films like these, nor should anyone try. This is a one-of-a-kind artist, and we should just feel lucky to have his cockeyed brilliance, holding up a fun-house mirror to ourselves and our society.

Qrobur In 1877 John Ruskin famously said of a painting by James Whistler that he was "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face" when dismissing it as not being art.My reaction to this film is quite similar. Yes, it's a film in the sense that it's a sequence of scenes intended to be viewed on a screen. Also, I suppose Roy Andersson believes he's making an important point about something - the banality of Man's inhumanity to Man, perhaps - with it. However, the idea that a running joke that is not funny, is itself funny, is not funny; or, at least, it's not funny in Andersson's hands. This nominally absurdist film is turgid, mirthless and all but featureless. It's extremely slow-paced, deliberately so.Consequently, it seems to me that Andersson has made a kind of "anti-film" as a metaphor for people's lack of empathy for each other. In doing so, he has completely defeated his own purpose as it's likely none but a very small minority of people could find much of worth in such a boring (non-)film.Almost as if Andersson lost conviction in his approach, towards the end of this assemblage of flat scenes there is a pair that, although shot in the same low-key style, are nasty. It's hard to avoid the impression that Andersson thought he had better do something unsubtle to make his audience understand that he appears to draw some moral equivalence between an everyday lack of empathy between people and more heinous acts.So we come back to Ruskin; whatever this effort is, I don't think it's a film. Does it have some other importance? I don't think so.