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www.boxoffice.com - : ''The way you have a sense of God, I have a sense of snow,'' says Smilla Jaspersen (''Sabrina's'' Julia Ormond) to a devout recluse (Vanessa Redgrave) in one of the most thematically effective scenes in ''Smilla's Sense of Snow.'' Jaspersen, who since her birth in Greenland to a native mother and an American father has always had an uncanny ability to navigate arctic landscapes, is on the hunt for clues to the death of a six-year-old Inuit (Clipper Miano); she doesn't believe the suspiciously placid police explanation. (''He was playing on the roof. He fell.'') Her doubts grow as she presses the case, and--in too easy fashion--learns significant facts: A famed arctic-medicine scientist (''Priest's'' Tom Wilkinson) insisted on performing the autopsy himself; a pathologist (''Bullets Over Broadway's'' Jim Broadbent) removed from the case found a strange mark on the boy; the recluse, a former employee of Greenland Mining, a company for whom the boy's father had worked until his own death in a mining accident, has a key to incriminating expedition records; Jaspersen's American father (''Lost Highway's'' Robert Loggia), a noted physician, on examining the dead father's X-rays discovers indications of a prehistoric parasite; and the Greenland Mining head (''Cry, the Beloved Country's'' Richard Harris) seems interested purely in payoff--both for the deaths and for his own pocket. As she continues probing, a sympathetic but mysterious neighbor (Gabriel Byrne, working here in ''Point of No Return'' mode) in her Copenhagen apartment complex continually comes to her aid, even as she ventures beyond Copenhagen and into the distant ice floes. more...
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