Involuntary

Swedish debut delivers style and substance but risks alienating its audience

This first feature from Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund arrives heavy with awards, the seasoned and decorated product of film festivals across Europe. Brutal, quirky and elegantly self-conscious, it does little to challenge the trends that have recently made Swedish cinema (Let The Right One In, The Millennium Trilogy) such hot property. The title serves as agent provocateur for the action that follows: a fractured and wilful deconstruction of group dynamics, of the pressures and “victims” of the social collective.

My Summer Reading: Musician Mike Scott

A trio of best-selling thrillers and an absorbing portrait of evil

Born in Edinburgh in 1958, musician, singer and songwriter Mike Scott has been the leader of the rock band The Waterboys for almost three decades. Perhaps best known for the sky-scraping hit single “The Whole of the Moon”, on albums such as Fisherman’s Blues, This is the Sea and Book of Lightning, Scott has consistently reinvented the band's sound, fusing folk, rock and pop and working with a changing cast of musicians.

The Girl Who Played With Fire

Larsson's novel has been eviscerated, leaving bad pulp fiction

This middle adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium crime trilogy will be followed almost instantly by the last. Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the elfin abuse victim and avenger who is the heart of the Larsson phenomenon, remains compelling. But after the surprise UK success of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo earlier this year (Swedish-language, like this), there is the strong whiff of the distributors offloading the rest while they can.

Madness in the Fast Lane, BBC One

Too many questions are left unanswered in this stranger-than-fiction tale

Words such as horror, grotesque, shocking and bizarre are fired at us before the title has even appeared on screen: clearly this documentary is set on living down to its sensationalist title. One bleak sunless day in May 2008, Swedish twins Sabina and Ursula Eriksson ran into traffic on the M6. Both miraculously escaped with their lives but then turned on the police officers trying to help them. With a lack of subtlety and restraint typical of this kind of schedule-filler, director Jim Nally shows us the footage of Sabina being thrown off the bonnet of a car at least twice more, slowing it down, freeze-framing it, and then just flashing up fragments of it - hammering home the kind of imagery which will have stuck in the mind of any sensitive viewer anyway.

theartsdesk in Fårö: Bergman's Swedish Dream Island

TAD AT 5: THEARTSDESK IN FÅRÖ A report from Ingmar Bergman's island of nightmares and catharsis

The midsummer sun beats down on the great director's place of nightmares and catharsis

Fifty years ago this April, a city-loving film-maker already internationally famous for such masterpieces as The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries took the ferry from Gotland to the windswept, still snowy island of Fårö (the nearest  we can get in terms of pronounciation might be "Four-er").

DVD Release: The Best Intentions

The fraught early relationship of Bergman's parents in Bille August's exquisite saga

At long last it's here on DVD: the greatest Bergman movie the master didn't make, though he wrote the most meticulously detailed, 300-page screenplay-cum-novel (which covers all the events of the four-part Swedish TV miniseries rather than the much shorter feature film we have here).  Naturally, too, he approved a luminous performance by Pernilla August who, under her maiden name of Östergren, frolicked as red-headed maid Maj in the film many love best, Fanny and Alexander, and who as the wife of Bille August, the very distinguished award-winning director of The Best Inten

Bengt Forsberg, Wigmore Hall

Bengt Forsberg: genial but tough in an extraordinary programme

True original among pianists shows his extraordinary range

He may not be the most famous musical Swede - in terms of name-recognition that would be Benny of Abba fame rather than Bengt the long-term recital partner of the divine Anne Sofie von Otter - but everyone in the business seems to adore Forsberg, a true musicians' pianist (and the only one I've ever seen unostentatiously to shake hands with his page turner). His boundless curiosity has always contributed to the repertoire of the great artists he works with; last night he stepped into the limelight - modest in presentation, infinitely tender in slow movements but tough as a top virtuoso needs to be in the fieriest works of his 11 chosen composers.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Ill-met sleuths in the first instalment of Stieg Larsson's cult Millennium trilogy

When roused, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the sullen, leather-clad, metal-pierced heroine ofThe Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is as ferocious as the panther her physical presence evokes. Forced to perform oral sex on her legal guardian, then raped by him, she returns to his apartment, fells him with a stun gun, binds him naked, makes him scream with a dildo, plays him an incriminating  “candid camera” video of his attack on her, and tattoos “I am a sadist pig and a rapist” on his chest. Well, you may conclude, he had it coming.

First Aid Kit, Sneaky Pete's, Edinburgh

Everything seems possible for a pair of Swedish sisters

There is something eternally refreshing about catching a band on the first show of their first tour after the release of their first album. Banter remains untarnished by overuse; smiles appear spontaneous and gratitude genuine; mistakes are swatted away with a giggle and a sly curse. Hope – that most intoxicating of emotions – fills the air like the scent of fresh cut grass.

Insane in the Brain, Peacock Theatre

Swedish Cuckoo's Nest has two good scenes, but not enough thrilling dancing

On Britain’s Got Talent this year Diversity and Flawless raised the bar for street dance as far as mass British audiences were concerned, a public increasingly schooled by Sadler’s Wells’ smart and eclectic annual spring hip-hop festival. So Bounce, the Swedish crew  returning to London with its 2006 version of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, has new standards to compete with.