Capsule reviews.

Force Majeure, Ruth Rendell, etc.

Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund, 2014)

There’s an interestingly masochistic form of YouTube video where people persuade someone to pretend to break into their house and attack them, so that they can see if their dog defends them. The dogs mostly don’t. Why would they? They don’t have any innate ability to understand what’s going on when one human gets aggressive with another, and furthermore they’ve been bred not to be aggressive toward people. But because people have a certain kind of sentimentality about dogs, they expect them to know, just by instinct.

The wisdom of the ages indicates that trying to test these things is looking for trouble but sometimes of course trouble comes looking for you. In Force Majeure, Tomas abandons his wife, Ebba, and their two children to the tender mercies of an avalanche when it looks like they’re all about to die… only it turn…