New in cinema & streaming: which films are worthwhile – and which are not – culture

Are You Lonsesome Tonight?

Sofia Glasl: Technician Xueming has told too many times why he is in prison to be sure of his own memory. A car accident at night, a dead man and a hit-and-run are stored in it. But also his attempt to sneak into the widow’s life and to understand why she is being harassed by her husband’s dubious creditors. The Chinese filmmaker Wen Shipei broods over the workings of memory in his debut film and turns it into an allegorical noir thriller in which identities become completely blurred, conscience and morality are relative and criminals sometimes become the saviors.

Licorice Pizza

Tobias Kniebe: Gary is a fifteen-year-old child actor and young entrepreneur in the waterbed business, a great charmer and a chatterbox. Alana is ten years older, smart and cool but a bit aimless. In the San Fernando Valley of 1973, he thinks love will come of it, and she laughs at him. But then she gets involved in his adventures, which Paul Thomas Anderson feel a lot like real life. Here a master shows that great cinema can also be very easy, supported by the two acting discoveries of 2021: Cooper Hoffman and singer Alana Haim in their film debut.

monobloc

Philip Stadelmaier: The interesting subject of Hauke ​​Wendlers Documentary film is the often white plastic chair called Monobloc, produced billions of times. The object, which is distributed around the world, serves Wendler on his travels to the Global South to mark existing global inequalities: what is despised in Germany as cheap furniture supplies Africa, India and Brazil with material for wheelchairs, for recycling and an affordable place to sit that is not on earth is.

The Other Side of the River

Moritz Baumsteiger: Some political documentary filmmakers work with interviews, historical material, diagrams. Others follow a person with the camera without having to explain at length – and yet manage to convey a lot. Antonia Killian spent months in north-eastern Syria accompanying a young woman who was to be forced into marriage, ran away and now wants to keep order with a gun in her belt, as a police officer. An unusual story. In a surprising documentary.

shadow hour

Fritz Goettler: A Thursday in December 1942. Jochen Klepper, a widely read Christian writer, is quoted on SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Eichmann. Klepper informed him that his marriage to a Jewess would be dissolved, that his wife and stepdaughter would be deported so that Klepper, free from Jewish influence, could continue to write valuable articles for the German people. A marriage in the shadows… the space becomes very narrow around the three of them, even the cinematic is pushed together, in front of the camera. The family has decided to commit suicide together. The claustrophobia of that night breaks Benjamin Martins jerkily again and again through puppet play-like alienation, so the mean mechanics of the story becomes visible. You talk about dying like others talk about baking bread, says a friend bitterly, who came in for a final conversation.