Starts of the week: which films are worthwhile – and which are not – culture

Everything that makes us happy

Philipp Stadelmaier: Portrait of a group of men (including Pierfrancesco Favino) and a woman (who gets involved with everyone), from the eighties until today. A self-portrait of Generation X of Gabriele Muccino, a soap opera epic à l’italienne on steroids, the protagonists of which have survived all political questions and scruples to settle in the aesthetic of an Asti commercial.

Boss Baby – No more kindergarten

Ana Maria Michel: Children who grow up too early, brothers who grow apart, and babies who are supposed to rule the world: Tom McGrath’s sequel to the animated film from 2017 offers a wild mix of topics. The Boss Baby Ted from Part One is now a man, but he and his brother have to transform into an infant and a second grader for a mission led by a new Boss Baby. Funny in places, but overall very weird – and not really suitable for younger children.

You She He & We

Josef Grübl: Some ideas already sound so crazy in theory that they are guaranteed to fail in practice. Like in this chamber play by Florian Gottschick: Two young couples try to swap partners, but want to forego sex. Of course, it doesn’t really work, which is why they get into each other’s hair all the more afterwards. That is more annoying than amusing, because the prominent actors (including Jonas Nay and Nilam Farooq), the beach house on the North Sea, the plot twists or the constant use of split screens do not help. (Netflix, October 15)

Finally Tacheles

Anna Steinbauer: The Holocaust as a computer game in which you can actively intervene in the past: The Jewish game designer Yaar is working on the development of a game with a Jewish girl and an SS officer as protagonists, which is inspired by the tragic fate of his grandmother Rina. Can there be reconciliation in the end? Jana Matthes and Andrea Schramm provide tearful, intimate insights into the process of coming to terms with the intergenerational trauma of a Jewish family between Germany, Israel and Poland.

It’s just a phase, rabbit

Anke Sterneborg: The body goes a little out of the glue, the energy is dwindling, with writer’s block comes the dodging, plus a fatal tendency to make a fool of yourself: It used to be called the midlife crisis, the authors Jochen Gutsch and Maxim Leo have in theirs Bestseller consolation book for this coined the beautiful term of old age puberty. Florian Gallenberger has brought the counselor episodes into the flow of a story that one would have wished for a little more restraint with clichés and rumors, proctologists and Viagra jokes. Nonetheless, the film develops a pleasurable charm, especially thanks to Christiane Paul and Christoph Maria Herbst, who, for once, plays a lovably planned guy with a lush mat and lets his horror at the circumstances seep through with proven minimal effort.

Fly

Ana Maria Michel: Almost 25 years after “Bandits” brings Katja von Garnier the old crew – Katja Riemann, Nicolette Krebitz and Jasmin Tabatabai – together again in front of the camera. Back in prison, but this time as a lawyer, social worker and dance teacher. A group of young people who happen to be very talented is about to take part in a street dance rehabilitation program. The dance scenes are quite impressive, many roles are played by professional dancers. But the script contains too many coincidences and too much kitsch.

The Ice Road

Doris Kuhn: Poor Liam Neeson. Now he’s so old that he can barely run, and yet he still has to save lives. This time he is driving a truck across frozen lakes in the far north, it is in a hurry, he cannot take into account that it is actually too warm for that. In fact, the dangerously thawing ice surfaces are exciting to look at while everything else is in Jonathan Hensleighs Action thriller shares the clumsiness of its main character.

The Last Duel

David Steinitz: “Me Too” in the Middle Ages. Marguerite de Carrouges says she was raped by a friend of her husband’s. The accused denies everything, the husband challenges him to a duel. Ridley Scott tells this true story with many stars (Matt Damon, Adam Driver, Ben Affleck) and, despite the obligatory frenzy of battle, finds the calm for a relentless story about the misogynous men of the year 1386. Unfortunately, he does not reveal what this is supposed to tell us today.

Lobster Soup – The most relaxed café in the world

Philipp Stadelmaier: Pepe Andreu and Rafael Moles portray a traditional fishing café on Iceland, for which they capture fishermen and fish, hot coffee and steaming geysers, regular customers and paying tourists with their cameras. The end of the café (it is sold) is the end of the film, which, like so many documentaries about something curious, begins in the arbitrary and ends in the thoughtful. You don’t learn how to make great lobster soup. Too bad.

Resistance – resistance

Anke Sterneborg: The Polish Jewish director tells how Marcel Marceau became the most famous mime in the world Jonathan Jakubowicz. In the formative years in the French resistance, when he helped smuggle hundreds of Jewish children from France into Switzerland, the focus is also on how to use art to make politics, as a pantomime, an actor, even a fire-eater. In a volatile narrative with an unnecessarily pathetic plot, it is the quiet intensity of Jesse Eisenberg’s body language that gives the film a strong center. Matthias Schweighöfer, who is now more involved in the darker side, plays Klaus Barbie as a caricature of a Bond villain.

The school of magical animals

Ana Maria Michel: There’s a lot going on at Ida’s new school, which is a bit like Hogwarts from “Harry Potter”. You and a classmate each get a magical animal that can talk and should be a friend to them. There is also a thief hanging around. Gregor Schnitzler brings Margit Auer’s bestseller series to the cinema with real actors and animated animals. You don’t learn much about the background of the animals, but this film about friendship is fun just because of the turtle’s breakdancing interludes.

They used to be stars

Sofia Glasl: If everyone is really entitled to 15 minutes of fame, then David Kramer and Holger Bülow alias Sheriff Held and Commissioner from the web series “Kreuzkölln Kops” also deserve it. In 2010 the two had a small and bizarre online success somewhere between “Tatort” and cheap westerners. Now they want to build on old times, at least supposedly. Low budget filmmaker Malte Wirtz In the mockumentary “They were once stars”, he writes a story of overconfidence and community that is as absurd as it is heartfelt, which also (or especially?) gives strength when all that remains is mutual failure.

Supernova

Martina Knoben: A love story, beautiful and sad – that there are two men who love each other (played by Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci) doesn’t really matter. After a long life together, someone suffers from early dementia. Together they go on one last trip, joking and teasing each other like they used to, but the consequences of the disease cannot be overlooked. Harry Macqueen shows the starry sky with a supernova at the beginning, then the hands of the two men together. Whether intergalactic or interpersonal – everything is encounter and exchange.

Room 212 – On a magical night

Susan Vahabzadeh: Not everyone has to keep up with the times – for Christophe Honoré the greatest of all directors is still the master of the Mélo musicals, Jacques Demy. In his mind, he tells of a woman (Chiara Mastroianni) who checks into a hotel room across from her apartment and meets a younger version of her husband, his great love, her conscience and all sorts of past affairs, while the world outside is inside a snow globe seems to transform … A crazy story, but deeply poetic – all love, they say, arises from memory. A film like a chanson from the sixties.