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

TheBatman

Fritz Goettler: “I am vengeance” … I am revenge, Batman explains to the dark guys on the streets of Gotham City, then he hits hard and powerful. Matt Reeves, most recently successful as a “Planet of the Apes” director, has further noirized the DC comic character, after Christopher Nolan’s trilogy. And found in Robert Pattinson, star of the Safdie brothers’ ‘Twilight’ films and independent gem ‘Good Time’, a tired, frail fellow who seems only disturbed without his heavy leather suit, with dark spots on his family history and black make-up under his eyes, left alone with the question of whether he really is the right person to decide on law and order.

The Card Counter

Tobias Kniebe: One look into the eyes of Bill (Oscar Isaac) and you know: This man is haunted by his past. Bill plays blackjack and poker in different casinos, mathematically and methodically. He wins but never by much, seeking solace in routine and repetition. Nightmares show him as a soldier, as a torturer in Abu Ghraib in Iraq, for which he spent a long time in prison. Now a young man is disturbing his peace, awakening feelings of guilt and fantasies of revenge against the superiors who got away with it, giving hope for a belated redemption. The filmmaker Paul Schrader adds another very powerful portrait to his great gallery of seekers and tormented (like the “Taxi Driver”). One of the best films of the past year.

Coppelia

Annette Scheffel: Jeff Tudor, Steven de Beul and Ben Tesseur wandering between media: the trio of directors transported Léo Delibe’s ballet classics into a brightly colored animation world that conjures up the Technicolor intoxication of old Disney fairy tales. A live-filmed ensemble of international ballet stars dances to this. The camera follows the choreographies with weightless movements, and the virtual imagery is also exciting at first – you hardly get to see this kind of color spectacle anymore. But the magic is quickly lost, mainly because of the monotonous, newly composed music and a theatricality that works better on stage than in the cinema.

Cyrano

Anne Sternenburg: The theater classic “Cyrano de Bergerac” adapted as a musical by Eric Schmidt, who, as the wife of the short Peter Dinklage, has a special perspective on the subject. The three of them give the author, the actor and Joe Wright as a director, the airy game of confusion, in which two men courting the same woman perfectly complement each other, new depth and universality. The film was shot in the Sicilian baroque town of Noto, which became a very real stage on which the wonders of theater and cinema unfold. And the transitions from reality to musicals, from speaking to singing and from everyday work processes to sophisticated dance choreography are so fluid that one is very happy to be carried away.

Towards life – Kindertransporte to Sweden

Doris Kuhn: In 1939, Sweden gave asylum to around 500 Jewish children from Germany. They were saved from the Holocaust, most of their parents were not. Gülseren Sengezer talks to four of these survivors about their memories. They talk slowly, the camera comes as close to them as their words to us. One learns about farewells and lonely new beginnings, about the suffering that has remained to this day – a very personal recapitulation of the anti-Semitic Nazi terror and the terrible consequences.

The Godfather (revision)

Philip Stadelmaier: Based on Mario Puzo’s Mafia bestseller Francis Ford Coppola at just 31 years old (and confronted with countless conflicts during the production) this classic of film history, which is as much an epic still life as an intimate family portrait. The darkness, the calm, the heaviness of the bodies, Marlon Brando’s stuffed cheeks and Al Pacino’s ingeniously restrained game, all of this can now be admired again where it belongs: in the cinema.

Trouble Every Day

Sofia Glasl: The doctor Léo keeps his girlfriend Coré in a room like an animal and has to catch her again and again at night when she goes on a foray. First she seduces strange men and then leaves them disfigured. Madness, desire and power are the mainsprings in Claire Denis’ film and come to a head in scenes of bloody rage. Cinematographer Agnès Godard turns the breathtaking Béatrice Dalle into an ambivalent figure – beguiling and repulsive at the same time. Twenty years after the premiere in Cannes, the sensual, cannibalistic horror fantasy can now also be seen here in the cinema and pays tribute to Denis as a pioneer of transgressive female cinema, to which Julia Ducournau owes a lot with “Raw” and “Titane”.

What to do

Josef Gruebl: If artists want to change the world with their work, that can be good for the world – but this rarely applies to the work. The actor Michael Kranz travels to Bangladesh in his debut as a documentary filmmaker to look for an underage forced prostitute whom he saw in a film. He collects donations on site and founds a children’s home, he even finds the girl. It’s good. But does that also make the film good, which could easily be dismissed as an image booster in its own right? Kranz knows about this danger, he tackles it head-on, quarrels with himself, questions his actions. And in the end, the camera opens doors for him that would otherwise remain closed.

Wood

Anne Sternenburg: A documentary undercover spy thriller that follows the paths of illegally cleared timber, from Romania and Peru to China, America and Austria. Michaela Kirst, Ebba Sinzinger and Monica Lazurean-Gorgan accompany Alexander von Bismarck, head of the NGO “Environmental Investigation Agency” in his persistent fight against the international timber mafia. Using fictitious identities of potential buyers and sellers, he and his comrades-in-arms infiltrate the mafia structures of powerful companies, above all the Austrian Schweighofer group. Using drones, hidden cameras and microphones, they collect evidence that they pass on to the press and governments.