The American
Thriller, Servus TV, Saturday, 8:15 p.m
The second film by the photographer Anton Corbijn, whose weakness for cold light finds its purpose here: The film follows a lonely man in a village in Abruzzo, who sometimes gets close to someone, the priest for example, but he can’t trust anyone: The hitman and Weapons specialist Jack (George Clooney) prepares for his next mission. The last one he shot his own girlfriend. Not in cold blood, but out of necessity to escape undetected. The fact that he falls in love, and he does so again in Abruzzo, is his weakness – otherwise he carries out his tasks with the precision with which he constructs weapons. Corbijn concentrates so calmly on details and atmosphere that the end result is not a portrait of a killer, but a study.
Mr Holmes
Drama, RBB, Saturday, 11:30 p.m
You can’t rely on the ghosts of the past, you can lock them up and then they manage to free themselves. It’s 1947, Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen) is returning from a trip to the country house where he retired many years ago. The housekeeper’s son (Laura Linney) has entered his sanctuary, the locked office, in his absence. The old gentleman begins to remember his last case, the one that made him retire from the detective business. Bill Condon directed the film in 2015, a beautiful interweaving of fiction: Holmes is bothered by the way Watson falsifies his experiences. Ian McKellen turns it into a great character study of a genius who slowly realizes that he isn’t one anymore and has to find something that matters in life.
Abraham Lincoln vampire hunter
Fantasy, Vox, Saturday, 10:35 p.m
A daring idea for a film: Abraham Lincoln becomes a lawyer and president in this film, and he ends slavery – although he has found out that vampires from New Orleans are undermining the United States. Posterity remembers his speeches, but not his most important mission: slaughtering vampires. Among other things, the vampires have bitten his mother, and young Lincoln seeks revenge. He meets a man who he can apprentice with because he hunts vampires himself. They’re behind slavery, so the future president goes hunting for it. Of course, this wild story isn’t good at all for coming to terms with history, but it does help to reduce the build-up of aggression: Director Timur Bekmambetov takes great pleasure in pulverizing his villains.
The big crash
Drama, Das Erste, Monday night, 12:05 a.m
One of the first films about the 2008 financial crisis, JC Chandor’s film, celebrated its premiere just three years later at the Berlinale: An investment bank has just laid off large parts of its workforce, including its risk manager. Before he left, he passed on material that led to a nightly crisis meeting – the bank has a lot of bad loans. Kevin Spacey and Paul Bettany play two of the participants, Jeremy Irons plays the boss who actually has no idea about anything because he is not interested in details. Now it’s being discussed what needs to happen – to save the company, not the world: to pass as much of the self-inflicted damage on to others as possible. The bank does not have a name; all resemblances to reality are, of course, purely coincidental.