It's a long way from Berlin to the Black Forest. Two worlds: What counts in one is irrelevant or even despicable in the other. The journey takes eleven hours on a motorbike, Maria (Bibiana Beglau) roars across the country - not without stocking up on drugs beforehand - and then lands like a strange spaceship in the wintry mountain village. Here is her parents' house. There is still snow on the tops of the trees.Maria's arrival is just as icy....
For example the scene with the wave. High Commissioner de Roller, representative of the French state in French Polynesia, takes a trip on the water. To show presence, to offer favors to the island's top surfers. Or to get out of the office where you don't see him once during the film. De Roller's office is the island itself, with its bungalows and nightclubs, its vegetation and the ocean.So De Roller gets on a man on a jet ski and...
If a man is really grumpy in the first scene, a real misanthrope, you can feel a little sorry for him. Everyone knows, except for himself, that he is in a reform school called a cinema. There one is inevitably led back to philanthropy. Not only in Hollywood, by the way, there are examples from all over the world, particularly beautiful ones from the grumpiest regions of Scandinavia. The Swedish film "A Man Called Ove" was such a case eight...
from Fritz GoettlerIt's always good to have an elephant in the back room, especially at an orgiastic superparty in 1920s Hollywood, with hundreds of freaky people thrown into wild unpredictability by bubbly and coke, thick air, and sexual uninhibitedness. So at an event like this, if a frighteningly lifeless showgirl needs to be removed, you simply herd the elephant through the crowd in the hall and draw everyone's attention to it while the girl is carried away from behind. source...
Friendship can become home. Eleven-year-olds Pietro and Bruno are as surprised as they are excited when they meet in the small northern Italian mountain village of Grana in the early 1980s. Both are only children and used to doing things alone, as the adult Pietro reports in retrospect: "I never thought I would find a friend like Bruno." You can see the two boys roaming through summery alpine meadows and jumping into a clear mountain lake, cheering. Bruno ahead because...
Two men arguing off the coast of Ireland, a hundred years ago: "The Banshees of Inisherin" is a great feature film starring Colin Farrell.from Tobias KniebeThe green of the meadows when the fog lifts. The spray on the steep coast. A rainbow over the harbour, the sea shimmering silver in the afternoon light: the beauty of the island of Inisherin, which lies somewhere off Galway on Ireland's west coast, plays a leading role in this film. She primes him with...
It starts with a crash course, a few film clips of all kinds of car accidents, plus a little philosophy of these terrible events. There is nothing violent about them, we are told, they are in the tradition of American optimism... Professor Murray is lecturing, played with very dry irony by Don Cheadle. "You have to think of it like Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July, days of self-celebration. An American director says: I want this flatbed truck to do...
Being a critic can sometimes be so simple. Especially when it comes to destroying authors and their works. Because the critic knows that he can turn everything into its opposite. If he is touched by a work, he writes that it is sentimental. If the book is written in a classic, simple style, then it's conventional. The critic finds the text funny? The text is silly! Unpredictability is renamed confusion, clear structure predictability, and so on.Lucien Chardon (or Lucien de...
With "I Wanna Dance with Somebody," Whitney Houston gets a biopic that isn't fixated on her tragic ending. But, for example, on a love that nobody knows.Of Juliana LiebertIf, as Tolstoy said, all happy families are alike, and each unhappy one is unhappy in its own way, why are the misfortunes of unhappy pop stars so alike? Why are Whitney Houston's and Amy Winehouse's stories similar in so many respects? Both exceptional talents, both betrayed by their fathers for money,...
Red strobe light, circles, angular shapes: the film begins under full stress during a circus performance in the ring. The protagonist doesn't seem to know what's happening to him, but he has to endure it. The young woman who lets him perform the tricks is affectionate to him and provides him with cuddles and carrots. But the arena, the circus, the spectacle, all of that belongs to the realm of the human being. He, the donkey named Eo, can't do...
