Another Round

Four high school teachers launch a drinking experiment: upholding a constant low level of intoxication.

In Thomas Vinterberg’s new film “Another Round,” four Danish men, all schoolteachers, embark on a pseudoscientific quest: to see if drinking daily will pull them out of their midlife slumps. If you don’t know Vinterberg’s work, this might sound like the premise of a dumb men-being-boys comedy à la “The Hangover.” If you’re familiar with the Danish director’s films, you might expect something dark and satirical — like “The Celebration” or “The Hunt,” which wryly expose the nasty undercurrents of bourgeois existence. Middle-class lives do come unspooling in “Another Round,” but this odd little film turns out to be neither farce nor moralistic provocation. It’s a sweet, strangely modest tragicomedy about the pleasures of (mostly banal) excess.