Home For Christmas

MUST SEE: Bent Hamer's Home For Christmas (Norway, 2010) - Highly sentimental but never sappy, "Home for Christmas" is cause for celebration. Norwegian writer-director Bent Hamer's trademark deadpan humor (as in "Eggs" and "O'Horten") gets a lively boost from the pic's emotive ensemble, as a multiplicity of steadfast characters in snowy Skogli manages to transcend holiday-season loneliness, anxiety and depression. Hamer's vignette style appears at once loose and assured, building toward a quiet epiphany that viewers of any religious persuasion can appreciate. Given the proper seasonal push in territories far and wide, the crowd-pleasing "Home" could well hit auds where they live. 2010SANSic, 2010TOR, 2011PALM. RATING: 8