1.78:1 DVD capture: Brothers The DVD

Canadian rights-holder Warner ushers Brothers to DVD in a sufficiently sleek 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. The film was shot on digital video and transferred to film for exhibition, and from the light sheen of grain, this appears to be a celluloid transfer rather than a direct port of the DV master. Nevertheless, the image is crisp and luminous, though a pervasive iris effect--an obvious aesthetic choice perhaps aggravated by the multiple passes through the telecine--takes some getting used to. As befitting the picture's quasi-documentary approach, the Danish Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is definitively modest, although Johan Söderqvist's score occasionally reaches around the viewer. Unless you count English subtitles, there are no extras.-Bill Chambers

The Film
excerpted from a longer review found here

At least ex-Dogme 95 Dane Susanne Bier's follow-up to her affecting DV melodrama Open Hearts is less an exercise than it is a rut--locating another beautiful young couple torn apart by a senseless tragedy that rewrites their lives. A shame that this time around, not content with character study, Bier and screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen inject a weak anti-war text that succeeds in making the film adolescent and shrill. Swimming upstream against the vehicle's obsolescence is Connie Nielsen, the wife of a Danish soldier, Michael (Ulrich Thomsen), downed in Afghanistan while his no-account brother Jannik (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is left stoking the home fires. After Michael returns from his cheaply-plotted imprisonment, complete with terrible Deer Hunter secret folded to his breast, a little Deathdream breaks out--but without the subtlety. Nielsen is a standout in the midst of a uniformly exceptional collection of performances, not required, as the others are, to spout a lot of topically obsolete dogma about how awful is war when it brings no profit to the warring. Regressing through ambition, Bier would have done better to let her cast loose in their skins than to try to impose the weight of the world on their shaken shoulders.-Walter Chaw

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