In Valhalla Rising, Mads Mikkelsen, the imposing Danish actor who made a sizable impact as James Bond's villainous adversary in Casino Royale and again as a sexy, forceful Igor Stravinsky in Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, now essays a new kind of leading role-as a tattooed, one-eyed mute enslaved by a vicious warlord to kill off enemy tribes in bare-knuckle combat. Silent and deadly, he roams the scorched landscapes of the earth in the time of the Scottish clans (the movie was written and helmed by a film festival favorite, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, and is a co-production from both Denmark and Scotland, with minimal dialogue spoken in English), tearing out jugular veins with his teeth, smashing skulls into bloody stumps with rocks, disemboweling his victims while their scattered entrails pile up like carnage from a charnel house. His only friend is a young boy of unknown origin who brings him food and water. Caged and shackled by his feudal master, One Eye is treated like a collared dog until he discovers salvation in the New Order that is sweeping society-a powerful spiritual force called Christianity. Enter the leader of a band of scruffy Christians caring lethal hatchets (no peace-loving disciples here, auditioning for positions as alter boys) on a mission to find Jerusalem, with One Eye and his loyal boy servant in tow. It is 92 minutes of unspeakable violence guaranteed to sour your stomach. Do not see this movie after Mexican food.

How many severed heads impaled on sticks, knives ripping through kidneys and guts piled along the road can the traffic in one movie bear? As I said, this thing is 92 minutes long, but it seems more like 92 days at hard labor. Divided into six sections, called (for no logical reason) "Wrath," "Silent Warrior," "Men of God," "The Holy Land," "Hell" and "The Sacrifice," it goes on for 45 minutes before it even shows you a tree; the ravaged locations look like a desolate foreign planet. Comparisons to the equally depressing but more substantive and visionary The Road are inevitable, and everything is doubly enigmatic. "Where does he come from?" the Christian asks, not sure One Eye can hear him. "He was brought up from hell," says the boy. And hell it is, relentless and boring. Searching for the Holy Land, they sail through a mist-enshrouded sea with no current, in a scene that seems eternal. The only sound is the creaking boards of corpses being thrown over the side. When they finally land, they are not at the promis ed land, but at a place inhabited by savages in loincloths who look like extras from The Last of the Mohicans. Could it be that One Eye is a displaced pilgrim in the wrong century, beating Christopher Columbus to the draw?

Valhalla Rising is nothing more than an updated version of the kind of time-honored Hollywood Viking  movie Kirk Douglas used to do in his sleep, which means lots of inhuman, bone-crunching violence and no plot. For a juggernaut with one eye sewn shut who never says a single word, covered with mud, slashes, burns and bruises, Mr. Mikkelson still cuts an imposing figure, but Valhalla Rising doesn't look like it was any more fun to make than it is to watch.

VALHALLA RISING
Running time 92 minutes
Written by Roy Jacobsen and Nicolas Winding
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
Starring Mads Mikkelsen, Maarten Stevenson, Gordon Brown

1 Eyeball out of 4

It's been a long time since I've seen a film as sumptuous as Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. Exquisitely designed, lushly photographed, beautifully acted, this historic footnote to the secret lives of two of the most brilliant and fascinating people of the 20th century is absolutely mesmerizing. Who knew they were lovers?

Paris, 1913. Opening night of the Ballets Russes at the Champs-Elysees Theatre and the historic world premiere of The Rite of Spring by a revolutionary new Russian composer named Igor Stravinsky, a refined but destitute refugee living in exile. For music lovers of the haute bourgeois, weaned on Strauss and Tchaikovsky, it was like a stink bomb tossed into the middle of Maxim's. The re-creation of the production's pagan rites, replete with the visual splendors in décor, costumes and sets, is overwhelming, and so is the reaction to it, with Diaghilev and Nijinsky and the giants of the dance world dashing madly about in a hysterical panic as the hisses and boos began to swell less than five minutes after the curtain rose. Here is choreography staged in jerks and angles, accompanied by atonal percussion, violent brass and sawing strings; it elicits screams of "Outrage!" and "Go back to Russia!" The ensuing riot brings the police and is considered a major scandal, but at least one member of the audience is enthralled.

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, the brittle, stylish, sharply critical, opinionated and demanding French fashion icon who is already taking the world by storm, is so intrigued that she makes an early decision to turn the married Stravinsky into her live-in lover for however long it might amuse her. They don't meet until 1920, but the mutual attraction is so immediate that the wealthy couturier invites the penniless composer, his tubercular wife and their four children to live in her majestic country villa, Bel Respiro, where the luxury of peaceful gardens and fresh air offeres a beatific escape for Igor to work creatively on his music (and to steal conveniently into her bed chamber at all hours for mad passion). So much largesse in such close proximity leads to an inevitable affair that lasts for decades. Torn between love and loyalty for his ailing wife, Catherine, and his sexual addiction to Coco, the fabulous darling of Paris society, Stravinsky almost loses his sanity. Both lovers are non-conformists, geniuses in their originality, and seminal in their separate careers. While the film heatedly charts the sexual acrobatics in their relationship, it also parallels the way they inspire each other's finest achievements-long after the sex ended, she secretly finances his triumphant revival of The Rite of Spring in 1947, even designs the costumes, and he encourages the demanding, uncompromising precision with which she creates the 80 ingredients in her signature Chanel No. 5, basing its modernism on Stravinsky's music and the bottle on a cubic design by their friend Picasso. With painstaking accuracy and attention to detail, Dutch-born director Jan Kounen re-creates the differences and similarities in two very difficult artists and their methods of working. He never begins a composition with paper, but with notes transferred from his brain to the keyboard. She never begins a design with sketches, but has to feel the texture of the fabric with her fingertips. His passion only intensifies, but she remains too strong, self-reliant and willful to become any man's mistress. At one point, someone remarks that "she makes even grief seem chic." There is plenty of tragedy ahead, but nobody ever looked chicer in black.

Too bad someone has yet to make a movie solely about Stravinsky. He was the more interesting of the two-ending up in Hollywood, pals with Jean Cocteau, George Balanchine, Thomas Mann, Christopher Isherwood and Charlie Chaplin, conducting at the Hollywood Bowl, decorated by Pope Paul VI after a concert at the Vatican, arrested in Boston for his wild orchestration of the American national anthem, dining with President John F. Kennedy. He has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I wanted more of him, less of her. Still, there's enough material here to make up for any biographical oversights, and the visual opulence takes the breath away. The cameras take you to the actual lab in Grasse where the vials of perfume were tested endlessly before Chanel chose the one marked "No. 5," and to the burnished splendor of the Champs-Elysees Theatre where Stravinsky made his shocking debut. Pages of the production notes have been dedicated to the research archives and generosity of Karl Lagerfeld and the House of Chanel, which provided real clothes worn by Chanel and made filming possible in Coco's country manor in Garches, and granted full access to her world-famous apartment at 31 Rue Cambon in Paris.

Happily, the gorgeous look of the film is perfectly matched and faithfully served by the perfection of the actors. Anna Mouglalis is a revelation as the fashion revolutionary who brought women into the modern world. Tall and ravishing, she looks nothing like the short, butch little Coco, who in photos resembles Edith Head. No mention is made of her Nazi sympathies during World War II or of her other love affairs with the celebrated and the infamous. But her mixture of steely toughness and cool beauty is an Art Deco delight. Less fully developed as a character but equally riveting as a presence is the Danish star Mads Mikkelsen, a handsome, brooding Heathcliff of a hunk who made a big splash as the dynamic villain in the James Bond movie Casino Royale. Any movie about two of the most dazzling influences on art and culture the world has ever produced has a lot riding on its stars. This one is lucky to spotlight two actors who live up to every demand imposed by the subject matter. But everything works miraculously here, making Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky one of the most bountiful experiences of the year.

rreed@observer.com

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
Running time 120 minutes
Written by Chris Greenhalgh
Directed by Jan Kounen
Starring Anna Mouglalis, Mads Mikkelsen

4 Eyeballs out of 4

Curiously, that single non-Connery hiatus Bond, 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service—with the much-underrated George Lazenby as 007 and the exquisite Diana Rigg as the Italian countess he loves, marries and mourns—is actually my second-favorite entry in the series. Certainly Roger Moore was a comparatively lightweight Bond with his seven appearances in the series: Live and Let Die (1973), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979), For Your Eyes Only (1981), Octopussy (1983) and A View to a Kill (1985).

Mr. Moore was succeeded, briefly, by Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights (1987) and License to Kill (1989). Actually, Mr. Dalton came the closest to Mr. Craig in projecting stormy virility, and it was rumored that he did most of his own stunts. Still, Mr. Dalton’s vehicles were considered impediments to the flagging but still profitable property. Pierce Brosnan stepped into the breach with Goldeneye (1995), ably directed by Martin Campbell, who was to direct Casino Royale more than a decade later. Indeed, Mr. Brosnan was graced with unusually ambitious directors for his next (and last) three films in the franchise: Roger Spottiswoode’s Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Michael Apted’s The World Is Not Enough (1999) and Lee Tamahori’s Die Another Day (2002).

My recurring problem with Mr. Connery’s Bond vis-à-vis Mr. Craig’s—admittedly in retrospect—is that, though Mr. Connery was the coolest and smoothest of all the Bonds, his coolness and smoothness would curdle over the course of a movie into a smug facetiousness. I must hasten to add that this wasn’t true of most of his non-Bond roles.

Of course, Casino Royale has been adapted from Fleming’s first novel about 007, and so the character can profit from the vulnerability of a novice agent pitted against an ever more evil world. Bond’s relationship with his superior, M (Judi Dench), in London gets off to a rocky start when he blows up an African embassy in Madagascar after a spectacular pursuit of an agile bomb-dealer named Mollaka (Sebastien Foucan). The joke is that the whole city seems to be under construction, enabling Bond and Mollaka to exploit every unfinished construction site and skeletal edifice in their chase. The grim-faced Mr. Craig has already been introduced as a deadpan killer with a sense of humor about his comparatively new vocation, but it is a dry-as-dust humor that he purveys. I must confess that at first I couldn’t tell him apart from the villains in the crowd scenes—and this is good for a supposed undercover agent. As he flits about with seeming effortlessness from Madagascar to the Bahamas to Montenegro to Venice for the movie’s watery climax—part of the franchise’s formula—he never loses control of a character who manages to be stoical and feverish at one and the same time. Even when he is poisoned to within a heartbeat of death, and then later tortured in the most imaginatively painful way, some irreducible part of Mr. Craig’s Bond remains on the alert.

The poisoning occurs during a titanically high-stakes poker game in a Montenegrin gambling casino—a sequence that seems unusually prolonged, possibly to justify the title of the film and its opening playing-card credits. (There are spoilers to follow, so readers of tender sensibility should avert their eyes here.) After the high suspense created by visual cues attesting to the hypnotic power of kings and jacks, Bond finally wins his showdown with the arch villain Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), with a low-black-card straight flush beating Le Chiffre’s high-card full house. It helps that Le Chiffre is afflicted with an ocular problem that causes him to shed tears of blood; it also helps the film that Mr. Mikkelsen is slightly better looking than Mr. Craig, making the battle between good and evil onscreen visually more complex.

From her first briefing of 007, M makes it crystal clear that no ideological issues are involved in Bond’s hunt for arms merchants in the bomb trade; the only motive for Le Chiffre, his cohorts and even his enemies is money. This disclaimer neatly severs Casino Royale from the never-ending war on terror, both here and in Britain, which may be a good thing for the film—Bond is thereby released from getting an uncharacteristically patriotic gleam in his eye as he disposes of his antagonists.

What distinguishes Mr. Craig’s Bond from all the others, except Mr. Lazenby’s, is his expression of both passion and grief after winning and losing Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd, who seems for a time to have betrayed him—though, as it turns out, she has saved his life, not once but twice. The relationship begins on the comically sarcastic note that always bodes well for any movie relationship. Vesper displays a flair for the veiled insult, and Bond responds with a faintly amused curiosity. But he has been chastened by a previous affair that has gone badly for the married woman he recklessly bedded. The world he lives in is too dangerous for him to lightly contemplate another romantic adventure, but the rush of violent circumstances drive Vesper and Bond into each other’s arms, where they remain until their prior alliances rise up to engulf them. That Bond so convincingly retains his composure and sang-froid throughout all the horrors that ensue is a testament to Mr. Craig’s abilities as an actor, and to Mr. Campbell’s astuteness as a director.

People might think that my guiding mantra for Casino Royale and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (and most other movies as well) happens to be cherchez la femme. But change that to aimez la femme and I’d plead pleasurably guilty, even as I wholeheartedly recommend Casino Royale as one of the best pictures of the year—not that it will need much help at the box office.

Southern Belles

Joey Lauren Adams’ Come Early Morning, from her own screenplay, gives Ashley Judd her best role since she sizzled in the 90’s in Victor Nunez’s Ruby in Paradise (1993), Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) and John McNaughton’s Normal Life (1996). Ms. Adams shot her country-folk character study in North Little Rock, Ark., where she grew up, and it shows in her lack of malice and condescension toward her subject. For that matter, Ms. Judd grew up in eastern Kentucky, and so there isn’t much that the film’s protagonist and its writer-director don’t know about the real-life background from which plaintive country music springs.

We are introduced very quickly to the disreputable, one-night-standish side of Ms. Judd’s Lucy Fowler in a disheveled motel bedroom by the dawn’s ugly light. Lucy is trying without success to kick out a growly pickup that she has slept with, and so she dresses quickly and leaves him hurling insults at her for not showing more early-morning interest in him. Then a strange thing happens: She walks into the motel office and insists that the night’s frolic be put on her bill, even though her “date” has gallantly paid for the room in advance. We thereby learn economically that Lucy brings different pickups to the motel on a regular basis, and thus are spared the necessity of enduring too many of these grubby nights and early mornings.

Our next surprise comes when Lucy drives for what seems like an eternity to the neatly kept cottage that she shares with Kim (Laura Prepon), an apparently nice girl who clearly gets along with her even though she doesn’t go for Lucy’s brand of night-crawling and heavy drinking.

Our third surprise comes when we suddenly see Lucy in a hard hat, surveying a field with her boss, Owen (Stacy Keach), and discussing a shady civic ordinance that will cost Owen’s firm a considerable amount of money. Lucy’s job, it turns out, is that of a contractor involved in building cement foundations.

We are gradually becoming more interested in this unexpectedly self-supporting and self-sufficient woman, who is apparently battling some mysterious demons. She is certainly not the usual female victim of society’s shortcomings encountered in movies, but rather a spunky single woman who can dish it out and take it, too. But why is she so tormented?

We learn very gradually that Lucy’s mother is dead, and that her father, Lowell (Scott Wilson), is a heavy-drinking recluse who has never gotten over the guilt he feels for having driven his wife to an early grave through his womanizing. Lowell has never been able to communicate with his daughter, and he never manages to do so here—that would be too easy and sentimental. He does allow Lucy to accompany him to church for Sunday services, where they listen to a preacher talking intimately about Jesus without seeming ridiculous.

Finally, Lucy runs into a one-night stand named Cal (Jeffrey Donovan) who seems to promise more. He persuades her to go frog-fishing with him, then cooks the frogs for Lucy and Kim back at their place. The two women make very comical faces upon tasting this strange “delicacy,” which they never really considered a culinary treat from the outset. Somehow, this trivial setback seems to be a forerunner of deeper problems between Lucy and Cal.

Later, when Lucy returns to her favorite hangout, the Forge, where she drinks to the strains of country music on the jukebox and shoots pool with another older father figure in her strangely chaperoned existence (at least until she manages to pick someone up for another brief encounter), she bumps into Cal again—just as the old “date” we saw in the beginning begins pawing at her for an encore. She resists and Cal intervenes, and gets into a brawl with the man—which unaccountably infuriates Lucy. She then agrees to go off with another, less aggressive suitor, and Cal leaves in disgust.

But then comes the final surprise, which clinched the movie for me: When Lucy gets in the stranger’s car, she bursts into tears—and the stranger politely asks her to get out, because, as he says perceptively, she obviously has unfinished business with Cal, and he doesn’t want to get in the middle of it. He then drives off alone. I can’t remember ever seeing such a demonstration of generosity on the part of filmmakers toward an easily stereotyped minor character in a movie.

Unfortunately, Come Early Morning seems on the verge of disappearing into the flood of holiday-season releases. I was drawn to the movie, which happens to be Ms. Adams’ directorial debut, because I remembered the intelligence and feeling of her brilliant performance in Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy (1997). If and when Come Early Morning ever resurfaces on DVD, order it immediately—and while you’re at it, order Chasing Amy too, if you haven’t already seen it, and enjoy a dandy double feature with two country girls of enormous talent.