New in Cinema & Streaming – Culture

Daddio – A Night in New York

Martina Knoben: A taxi film. Dakota Johnson is the passenger, Sean Penn her driver. In the feature film debut of Christy Hall They drive from JFK airport to Midtown Manhattan and start talking. He is an older, old-school macho, she is a young IT expert. The invisible third person in the car is her lover, who sends text messages that are sometimes raunchy and sometimes sweet. Because an accident slows them down, the journey and the film last 90 minutes, which could be boring, because they only talk all the time: about the omnipresence of cell phones and apps, the differences between men and women, about her childhood and his marriage… But because the actors and dialogues are really good and the gender hierarchy is not as clear as it seems, the audience is happy to go along for the ride.

Déserts – For a handful of dirhams

Doris Kuhn: Two Moroccan debt collectors drive through the deserted south of their country, visiting desperately poor debtors and taking away their last sheep. They are well aware of their role as henchmen of capitalism, although Faouzi Bensaidi which he would like to interpret in a comedic way. After much laconicism, he changes the satire into a tragedy, creating a kind of desert western that hardly brings any momentum to the oppressive situation.

The equation of their life

Martina Knoben: Marguerite is a math nerd, as you often see in scripts: super smart and a Wonder Woman of numbers, but socially awkward to the point of suspicion of autism spectrum disorder. The fact that the film by Anna Novion The reason why it is so much fun despite the familiar pattern is the great Ella Rumpf (known from “Raw”), who plays Marguerite as a young woman who is both confident and vulnerable, brittle and yet attractive. After a serious error in her calculations, the elite student flees from university life, opens herself up (a little) to the world and catches up on her development: the way she follows a stranger on the street to achieve satisfying sex in her extremely pragmatic way is very, very funny and liberating. The nerd… the nerd – that makes a huge difference.

Elli – Unbelievably Secret

Fritz Goettler: Chamberlain, that is what Ellis’ uncle calls himself (i.e. chamberlain), the two apparently belong to the last existing ghosts in this world, in the animated film by Piet De Ryckerbased on the book by Klaus Baumgart. Elli dreams of a large family like the one shown in the old paintings in her haunted mansion. Chamberlain is captured by drones and taken to a giant tower where he is digitized like all captured monsters! This new dimension of horror remains a little pale in its angular abstraction, but the film really picks up speed when Elli, in an attempt to free her uncle, teams up with veteran monsters, a feminine yeti, a Frankenstein-like lad and a senile vampire with wobbly teeth.

Fancy Dance

Sofia Glasl: Missing persons reports are commonplace on the indigenous reservations, as is the indifference of the police. The former drug dealer Jax therefore sets out to find her sister herself. Her daughter Roki had promised to take part in the upcoming Grand Nation Powwow, the largest indigenous gathering in North America. With an eye for detail, the filmmaker Erica Tremblay from the often hopeless life on the reservation, but also from the support that the community’s centuries-old culture provides. Lily Gladstone, recently nominated for an Oscar for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” shines as the bitter Jax, but can’t do much against the ponderous social drama production (Apple TV+, from June 28).