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

Cry macho

Susan Vahabzadeh: A road movie with a rodeo rider, child and chicken. Clint Eastwood As a very old warrior Mike is supposed to bring a boy from Mexico to his father and first of all gives him a few lessons for life: You shouldn’t become obsessed with masculinity, for example. Eastwood’s film adaptation of a novel from the seventies is touching and yet somehow bizarre – the old warrior seems a bit frail and relies on senior discounts for filmmaking accuracy. Still a must for fans of Eastwood’s old work.

Cryptozoo

Anke Sterneborg: Hiding from the hijackers of government and business, or exhibiting publicly in the zoo and collecting money for the rescue of other threatened beings, that is the question that the cryptozoology activists in search of the dream-eating hybrid creature Baku have to ask themselves. As everywhere in the world, different people like a woman with a Gorgon head or a headless man with his face on his torso arouse desires and hostility. Dash Shaw, who already created an idiosyncratic artistic animation style for his action comedy “My Entire Highschool Sinking into the Sea”, turns it into a psychedelic cross between X-Men and freak show.

The French Dispatch

Juliane Liebert: More of a hidden object than a movie. The fastest player to find the most iconic actors wins. Tilda Swinton, Timothee Chalamet, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand take the door handle with lightning speed, while they are usually unemotional Wes Andersons new film about a dem new Yorker Give life to a modeled publication. Well, life. As far as one can say with Wes Anderson, the high priest of deeply felt artificiality. But the furniture is beautiful! You can read a detailed review here.

Halloween kills

David Steinitz: Of course you are inspired by a certain knife killer fatigue when the twelfth “Halloween” film comes to the cinema. But, dear pumpkin friends, there is good news: This is a very good horror film. After the director David Gordon Green has taken over the series and has already shot a part, he really starts now. The new episode is about the trauma that serial killer Michael Myers has caused in the small town of Haddonfield over the decades and shows that personified metaphysics lurks behind his mask (Longer review here).

The last city

Sofia Glasl: If films could dream themselves, “The Last City” would be from Heinz Emigholz probably a philosophical fever dream. In six associatively interwoven episodes, he lets his characters negotiate discourses and avant-garde concepts in erratic dialogues – concrete, confused, sometimes absurd: collective guilt, arms trade, the likelihood of time travel, dreams with cinematic titles like “The Last Pancake”, a city that constantly changes its place and in which people no longer recognize themselves. This is exactly what happens in his film, and the loops of time and thought that are kindled develop an essayistically wobbly life of their own, which at first confuses and inspires fear. Afterwards, however, these thought clouds form into precise and intelligent observations.

Ottolenghi and the temptations of Versailles

Anke Sterneborg: “Food is more interesting when you serve it with a story,” says famous London chef and author Yotam Ottolenghi. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York invited him to organize a gala event to accompany the exhibition “Visitors to Versailles”, he curated five outstanding pastry chefs from all over the world. They created an edible exhibition in which history, architecture, garden art, painting and music merged into a theater production from the kitchen: building and painting with sugar and chocolate. Laura Gabbert In its documentation it combines the chef’s biography with a social history of Versailles and the making-of of the exquisite dessert buffet.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

Fritz Goettler: A typical bachelor household, everything packed and untidy, and, strangely enough, a chicken is walking around inside. This is intended for the insatiable Venom who always wants to eat everything. Venom, the slippery, tentacled alien monster who has merged with Eddie Brock, the investigative journalist (Tom Hardy). They live in a symbiotic relationship, it doesn’t like to stay in the background, bullies him – “You’re a loser!” -, deforms and demolishes him, but also fights aggressively for him. Quite a strange study of the split personality of the Marvel superheroes, and the Magical Misery Tour of human life. In the second Venom adventure, staged by Gollum-Star Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson joins as an opponent, also plagued by a symbiote who – “Let there be carnage!” – is much more horrible than the child horror Venom and soon dominates the scenes with his splatter (Longer review here)

Walchensee Forever

Martina Knoben: The story of a women’s dynasty: great-grandmother, grandma, mother and child. The child”, Janna Ji Wonders, has now grown up and has made a documentary about herself and her family. The women’s journeys through life took them from the café on the Bavarian Walchensee via Mexico to San Francisco to the “Summer of Love”, to the “Harem” of Rainer Langhans and always back to the lake. Often men were by their side – but women then had to find their way without or even against them. From a small regional angle, the film reaches far into space and time. The women and their adventures and relationships are fascinating, documented in great archive footage: the director is obviously not the first picture collector in the family.