Avis des critiques

[The Celebration] can drop your jaw and leave you breathless... One is as walloped by the unabashedly theatrical manner with which Vinterberg divulges his taboo subject as by the narrative revelations themselves.

This is pure shock and awe, and the immediacy of the rough-and-ready style is perfect as the facades of numerous characters are shredded with devastating effect. This is family drama at its most coruscating.

[Festen] is perhaps the bleakest farce ever made, an all-out assault on the senses that leaves one unsure whether to laugh or cry... An audacious and staggering attack on the hypocrisy of the chattering classes and one of the most idiosyncratic tragicomedies in the annals of cinema.

Watching Festen is not easy and some will find the experience unremittingly bleak. This is a volatile movie... For those that can stomach it, however, this is an audacious and staggering attack on the hypocrisy of the chattering classes and one of the most idiosyncratic tragicomedies in the annals of cinema.

Of all the Dogme films, Festen holds up best today and even those who dismissed the movement as a gimmick are still drawn to this powerful story.

Maybe it makes a terrific play. That's entirely possible. Whatever the stage version's merits, however, they can at best be tangentially related to those of the movie, which—Aristotelian unities notwithstanding—is aggressively, relentlessly cinematic... The Celebration serves as a superb example of how editing creates meaning, in ways that can't be duplicated or even approximated in other media.

Played mostly as black anti-bourgeois comedy, this is thoroughly entertaining but rather less outrageous, substantial and original than it thinks it is... Reservations apart, however, it's an assured, admirably abrasive little movie which never outstays its welcome.

Festen's dour subject matter is treated without pathos or mawkishness. Instead, irreverent, wicked humour - often generated by Michael's explosive temper and ineptitude - is the signature of the film.

Although Festen plumbs a standard gothic rendition of the nuclear family... a very droll, finely poised wit lightens the load of recriminations... A camp sensibility hovers at all times, but never destroys the substance of the story. Festen is a unique treat.

An entertainingly misanthropic affair with echoes of Hamlet and The Godfather , shot in the deliberately primitive style of the Danish 'Dogme 95' group that eschews polished production values.

Vinterberg handles his material so cannily that we are must always look for clues to the intended tone... It's a tribute to "The Celebration" that the style and the story don't stumble over each other.

The writing displays a discipline and craft I haven't found in any of von Trier's work, creating a sculpted effect I associate most with the plays of Henrik Ibsen... The impact of The Celebration is something closer to what might be termed punk Ibsen — Ibsen shorn of his politics and his impulse toward social reform.