The title of “The Square,” the Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund’s savagely entertaining new movie, refers to a 4-by-4-meter illuminated box etched in the cobblestones outside the X-Royal, a venerable if entirely fictional museum of contemporary art in Stockholm. As he demonstrated in his 2014 drama, “Force Majeure,” Östlund is a brilliant anatomist of upper-class male fragility and all-around human selfishness. One of the aims of “The Square” is to lure him out of his white-walled intellectual cocoon. In laying a meticulous trap for the viewer, “The Square” at times veers into its own aesthetic and intellectual minefield. It affirms that art, this movie very much included, can tell us things about ourselves that we’d prefer not to know.

Source: Los Angeles Times October 26, 2017 18:00 UTC