Flame & Citron

Pimpernel Smith is a 1941 British war thriller in which an eccentric archeology professor uses a student dig in Nazi Germany as cover for a secret mission to free persecuted prisoners.

For our second movie this week, we did Flammen & Citronen.

Um, in English, that's Flame and Citron.

It's from 2008, and it's a Danish movie.

I did like that line.

[upbeat music]

So before we talk about our second movie, which is Flammen & Citronen, um, in English that's Flame and Citron, and again, this is a Danish movie.

I want to explain why I chose this movie.

I think of things like Ronin.

I think of things like Flame and Citron.

I think of weird TV shows that were the sort of runoff that we received on South African broadcast.

Things like The Pretender, really strange sort of psychological thrillers.

I'm such a voracious cinephile, so I watch everything and everything and anything that I can.

And so I remember just sort of picking it up and not necessarily knowing what to expect, specifically in a Tom Cruise-led vehicle about this particular subject matter, about this particular historical epoch.

But I did find interesting resonances with another spy film that I mentioned earlier that I absolutely love, which is Flame and Citron, starring Mads Mikkelsen.

And I think that there's some really interesting... aesthetic and narratological lines of flight that join the two, but I think Bryan Singer is able to marshal a fantastically capable cast.