Flame & Citron transports us to the often forgotten world of the face, the human face. Most films do not know of this world, or stay away from it, or do not know what to do when they arrive at the region of the eyebrow, the nose, the mouth, the cheeks and bone. But a strong director knows that a great face is far more important than a great actor.
Ole Christian Madsen—the director of Flame & Citron, a movie about two hit men working for the resistance during the Nazi occupation of Denmark—has this understanding. The face is the star of the movie. If your actor has deep eyes, or intense eyes, or purposeful lips, or determined eyebrows, exploit this more than their ability to deliver a line with accuracy or the right emotion. The actors in Flame & Citron (Thure Lindhardt and Mads Mikkelsen) can act, for sure, but what catches the eye (and in cinema, nothing matters more than catching the eye) are the faces of the actors. Lindhardt, who plays Flame (the young hit man), has great eyebrows, a solid forehead, eyes that draw you in, and a sharp nose. Mikkelsen, Flame’s older partner (he usually does not kill but drives the getaway car), has a face that is pure architecture. It’s a built face—broad and imposing like the facade of some government office.
Every scene in the movie—be it violent or not, be it essential to the plot or not—explores the expressions and various aspects of the actor’s look. Flame & Citron, which is also well-written and beautifully photographed, is worth your time. 
I’ve never thought about the importance of the face from a strictly aesthetic point of view. Bravo. I’m bookmarking this.
Sometimes a clever turn of phrase will make me forget simple common sense, but the second sentence of this review is the most patently and obviously stupid and false statement I’ve seen in a long time.
If only Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Zac Efron were in this film. 🙁
The Face of Garbo / Roland Barthes
“Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced.
…
“A mask is but a sum of lines; a face, on the contrary, is above all their thematic harmony.”