charlatan
Annette Scheffel: With a fascination for power structures, dedicates himself Agnieszka Holland after “Red Secrets” (2019) again the biography of a man who falls under the wheels of the Stalinist dictatorship. For her semi-fictional parable about the religious struggle of totalitarian regimes, she chose a dazzling and deeply contradictory figure: the Czech naturalist Jan Mikolášek, who rose to become a miracle healer in the interwar period, treated high-ranking Nazis and communists and later became the target of state security. What to believe in – in miracles, God, the power of nature, love or the state – is no longer a question of conviction, but of survival.
Effigie – The Poison and the City
Fritz Goettler: I can do evil with lust, says the notorious Gesche Gottfried, also known as the angel of Bremen. Deaths are piling up around them, in which mouse butter, a lard mixed with arsenic, is administered to combat rodents. Senator Droste investigates, supported – and sometimes annoyed – by his clerk Cato Böhmer. A woman in the criminal court?! The year is 1828, society and its ideology are opening up, also to the explanation of abnormal behavior, especially through new ideas from France. Suzan Anbeh and Elisa Thiemann are a dazzling couple in Gesche/Cato’s first film Udo Flohr, who himself refers to the great colleague who has already devoted himself to Gesche, Fassbinder and “Bremer Freiheit”. Flohr’s panorama from the beginning of the 19th century is pleasantly diffuse because it likes to draw the gaze away from the poisoner – 15 murders – towards Bremen’s efforts to connect to the world and its shops, railroad and freight port. Once, during an exhumation, it rains blood.
An Impossible Project
Martina Knoben: After two years of pandemic, digital detox no longer sounds like doing without, but like an unfulfilled promise. One person who has always felt the charm of analogue is Florian Kaps, den Jens Meurer portrayed in his documentary. Kaps had saved the last Polaroid work in 2008, he loves and collects vinyl and many other “old-fashioned” things to touch. The film tells the success story of rediscovered instant photography and is also a hymn to the analog. However, this is presented in the film in such a hip, contemporary way – everything is a curated event – that a streaming evening almost seems like the more authentic experience.
leave in love
Anne Sternenburg: A film about the painful and inevitable death of an almost forty-year-old acting teacher (Benoît Magimel) from pancreatic cancer, about a mother saying goodbye to her son, a person from life. Emmanuelle Bercot tells this drama as calmly and truthfully as she approaches the other things in life as a director. The idea for her second film with Catherine Deneuve was sparked by her encounter with an oncologist, who now also embodies the sensitive and charismatic doctor in the film. Basically, just as the actor works with his students, so does the doctor with his team and patients. For both of them, it’s about dealing with the big farewell with dignity.
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A night in Helsinki
Sofia Glasl: Who could more charmingly philosophize about the lockdown gloom without speaking up than the conservators of the Finnish soul: the Kaurismäki–Brothers. Leads this time Mika Kaurismaki Director, but Aki is there in spirit. The setting for this sympathetic chamber play is the legendary pub they run in Helsinki: the Corona Bar. The joke is on the house, because the three tragicomic drinkers on the verge of a nervous breakdown were already sitting together in 2008 in “Three Wise Men” and are still pondering, end of the world or not, about their relationships and the meaning of life.
Nobody is with the calves
Josef Gruebl: Amazing how many people still dream of country life. You know that the people there have nothing to say to each other, that they drink, hit, fuck around. It is unknown? In Sabrina Sarabis The adaptation of the novel happens – and in exactly the same order. Farm life in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania resembles a kind of limbo here, so it’s no wonder that young farmer and calf nurse Christin wants to leave. But the drunk, the sex and the beatings make her very lethargic. The always fabulous Saskia Rosendahl is also a show in this role, a ray of hope in all the country sadness.
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Nightmare Alley
Sofia Glasl: Eyes stare from everywhere. They seem to peer straight into the souls of those who have always felt invisible: the psychic with tarot cards, a mad-eyed savage, an inlaid fetus with three eyes. Where else the supernatural in the reality of fairytale horror worlds by director Guillermo del Toro falls, in this adaptation of the novel it is now the human abysses. Shortly before the Second World War, the showmen of a cabinet of curiosities enriched themselves from the good faith of their customers. Right in the middle is Stanton Carlisle, played with devious boyishness by Bradley Cooper. He takes his mentalist performance too far, falls for his own trick and unleashes a horror in this exuberant retro noir that would have been better left behind the facade of normality.
Sing 2 – The show of your life
Anne Sternenburg: Six years after “Sing” puts Garth Jennings after, with the proven mix of lovable charm, jolly wit, candy-bright colors and swinging covered songs by, among others U2, Aretha Franklin and Drake. Koala Buster Moon, originally voiced by Matthew McConaughey, wants to make it onto the big Las Vegas stage with the animal troupe assembled in the first film, with a gigantic science fiction musical extravaganza and the comeback of a star who has been in retirement for many years. On the way there, no resistance is too great, no heist too complicated, no thriving stage chorography too complex to be overcome with resourceful ideas.