Critic Reviews

There's nothing casual about the way this film has been put together, yet that painstaking care leads to laughter that is completely unrestrained.

Features an absurdist sensibility that ultimately melts your heart. It's certainly one of the stranger movies you'll see.

In the end, it's not the answer to the kitchen mystery that matters but the revelation that there's ultimately no difference between this bachelor scientist and his bachelor subject.

Serves to champion human irrepressibility and unpredictability. It's the flip side to the defeatism of "Distant," but with parallels, both in the very deliberate pacing and moments of visual wit.

It's a film that triumphs in small ways and satisfyingly demonstrates how our human nature is based on both the eccentricity of our hearts and the quirky workings of our heads.

Like all good films, it raises these types of questions, answering some, and leaving some for you to answer yourself.

In the wonderfully droll Kitchen Stories, Norwegian filmmaker Bent Hamer takes an already inspired premise and weaves it into a spry absurdist comedy that also manages to find some considerable warmth.

The film is saying that, left to their own devices, all men would devolve into a morass of monastic grouches. Kitchen Stories is a prime piece of comic anthropology.

Hamer, a meticulous observer himself, is a minimalist with heart.

In the landscape of contemporary movie comedies, Kitchen Stories is like a rejuvenating blast of crisp Nordic air.