The name alone sounds cumbersome. Cranko, it scratches the throat. But he is even more uncomfortable, the star choreographer warns the general director Walter Erich Schäfer, who has just appointed him director of the Stuttgart Ballet. John Cranko can’t believe his luck. After his homosexuality became known, he was literally chased off the stage in London. Now he is meant to revive the opera house in the capital of Baden-Württemberg in the early 1960s. Him, of all people, the broken genius, with the deep sadness in his blood.

After his Goebbels film FÜHRER UND VERFÜHRER, Joachim A. Lang ...

Every robot needs a task. Rozzum “Roz” 7134 is programmed to help others, solve projects, and overcome hurdles. Always efficient, always with a system. The agile metal creature is faced with a special challenge when one day it is stranded on a deserted island inhabited only by animals: suddenly its “clients” are beavers, squirrels, and wild boars. The “monster” made of metal has barely gotten used to the language and movement patterns of these foreign creatures when things get worse: Roz finds a gosling whose mother has died and Roz had something to do with it. And so Roz takes ...

It seems clear to practically everyone involved that MEGALOPOLIS will most likely be a flop at the box office. This doesn’t mean that Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project isn’t worth watching, because the film definitely is. There are grandios, hallucinatory film moments, and the film is bursting at the seams with ideas. But despite its 135 minute runtime, it feels too short rather than too long. A lot feels like a sketch, behind which discarded elements can only be surmised.

MEGALOPOLIS has more in common with post-dramatic discourse theater than classic film dramaturgy. The film is ...

In the opening scene of THE SUBSTANCE, a new star is being laid on Hollywood Boulevard. It’s for film star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore). Years later she’s a TV icon with her own aerobics show. Already on the decline, her star is about to burn out for good, as her sleazy manager Harvey (Dennis Quaid) unmistakably makes it clear to her. At 50, she’s too old. Her show is cancelled and her position is advertised via a casting call. In this fragile state, she receives a dubious offer: the youth agent “The Substance“ will enable her to clone a perfect, younger double (Margaret Qualley). ...

Ellen Kuras’ feature film isn’t about Lee Miller, in demand model and muse – LEE is about her iconic images of war: the London air raid wardens with their surrealist gas masks, the silk stockings hanging to dry in the window of a barrack for British female soldiers, the soldier Kurt, completely bandaged in white except for his eyes - "beautiful eyes" says Lee (Kate Winslet) - in a military hospital in Normandy. The screenplay follows Miller’s breathless campaign across Europe, her mission equally fueled by hatred, contempt, ambition, and empathy: to show the world what it is with her ...

New Yorker journalist Ruth wants to find out more about her heritage shortly after the fall of the wall. Her parents came from Poland and survived Auschwitz, she doesn’t know more than that, and there are no other relatives. Her mother recently died, now she’s convincing her father Edek to travel with her to the sites of his past. Edek reluctantly goes in order to protect his daughter, but he doesn’t share her need to find out more. He undermines Ruth’s travel plans and steers her away from places that are painful for him. But the daughter is also stubborn. The journey leads them to ...

Ezra (William A. Fitzgerald) is autistic. He used to be non-verbal, today he mainly speaks in quotes. He doesn’t like eye contact or hugs and he has issues with the texture of bananas and metal cutlery. His mother (Rose Byrne) and her new boyfriend (Tony Goldwyn) are willing to receive help – whether it’s medicine, special schools, or gripping his ear lobe instead of hugging. Ezra’s father Max (Bobby Cannavale) and his grandpa (Robert De Niro) wants to give him as “normal“ a life as possible by confronting him with the everyday. When Ezra is sent to a special school after an ...

Iranian Farahnaz Sharifi started having a double life at seven years old. The one in her own home, where there was dancing and singing, and outside, where she was meant to be invisible in a hijab, where music and dance, where singing women, was a crime. The first thing she always did when she got home from school is take her hijab off. This piece of fabric, according to Sharifi, is the control of power. As a film student she began to document with her cell camera, like an addiction. Parties with friends in what they believe were private spaces, until the moral police knocked on the door. ...

Green forests, sunny meadows, the alpine panorama on top of it – for 17 year old Gretchen (Hunter Shafer), it’s postcard kitsch ideal from hell. She reluctantly moves with her father (Marton Csokas) and stepmother (Jessica Henwick) from her home in the US to a Lower Bavarian province. Her father is supervising a building extension. The vacation domicile is abandoned in the off-season. Gretchen is alone with her grief over her recently deceased mother in this boring wasteland. Only Herr König (Dan Stevens), the manager, shows a strange interest in the teenager and her half-sister, seven ...

The year is 1800 and music reigns supreme at the College of Sant Ignazio near Venice. More specifically, the music of the insufferable Father Perlina. He is meant to compose a new piece for the upcoming papal visit and is suffering from a creative block. This is especially felt by the female orphan orchestra. What Perlina doesn’t know is that the biggest talent on campus is working as a domestic servant. For “mute“ Teresa, the entire world is made up of music. She feels the rhythm in the dullest work. The scratching of animals, the scrubbing of laundry, the knocking and chopping in the ...

It’s easy to understand why the works of painter Nickzard “Nicky“ Nodjoumi didn’t find favor in his theocratic homeland: in his art, he undresses women in niqabs, lets blood flow at the feet of Ayatollah Khomeini, and reveals the interrogation techniques of SAVAK, the former Iranian secret service. In A REVOLUTION IN CANVAS, his director and researcher daughter Sara looks for her father Nicky’s paintings that disappeared from the walls of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in the early 1980s for political reasons and tells his life story while doing so.

This biography doesn’t ...

Didi is actually called Chris, but is called Didi (little brother) by his family and Wang Wang by his friends. At 13, he’s at the worst phase of the teen years: he wants out of his sheltered home and into the world of older boys and first dates, but doesn’t know the codes and right language yet. He constantly stumbles into embarrassing situations, like when he tells the grossest story he knows while on a double date with his best friend and two girls. A dead squirrel makes an appearance. It’s a good story for the guys, but it’s a big fail here. Things seem to be going well with the ...

THE DEAD DON’T HURT is set in the 1860s in the American West. Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod), the son of the richest man in the area, comes out of a saloon. He committed a massacre and shot many people. Meanwhile, Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen), the sheriff, is burying his wife Vivienne (Vicki Krieps).

Viggo Mortensen tells the story of Vivienne and Holger on several time levels. They meet in San Francisco, where the French-Canadian is bored of being the mistress of a rich Englishman. She sees the Dane leaning on a wagon and approaches him. For their first date, she drags him to a ...

Director Oz (Osgood) Perkins is the son of Anthony Perkins. The actor who played the killer in Hitchcock’s PSYCHO died in 1992 from AIDS complications. Anthony Perkin’s never came out as gay. Oz Perkin’s mother Berry Berenson married Anthony in 1973 when the actor was going through conversion therapy. She hid Anthony’s homosexuality from the family and died in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. “As coded as it might be and as many layers of other stuff on it that there are, at the end of the day, all the movies I generate are essentially based on my experience, and that tends to be my ...

Though LOVE LIES BLEEDING is set in an 80s universe where the villains have mullets and the chain-smoking heroine listens to tapes to quit smoking, it is a thoroughly contemporary film, a wild, feminist narrative that finds emancipatory power in exploitation and horror cinema.

Director Rose Glass (SAINT MAUD) wastes no time: the camera glides through a red hellmouth into a starry sky and right into the beating heart of LOVE LIES BLEEDING, the run-down gym on the outskirts of town where Lou (Kristen Stewart) is the manager. Muscles are strained to the point of tearing, flesh jiggles, the ...

DADDIO is a brave undertaking for a debut. The film is shot in quasi real time, during a 100 minute cab ride from JFK Airport to downtown New York. It is the last ride of the day for Clark (Sean Penn) and his passenger (Dakota Johnson) also gives off the impression that she has had a tough journey behind her. After a period of silence, Clark begins with a tirade about the "fucking apps," by which he means the competition from Uber, the tips that used to be bigger, and the cell phones that his customers stare into. But she doesn't do that - "you are a human." - a good transition to carefully ...

Jeff Nichols’ THE BIKERIDERS is a film adaptation of the eponymous photo and interview book by Danny Lyon. “The Bikeriders“ was published in 1968, a year after Hunter S. Thompson became a reporter legend with “Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.“ Danny Lyon was a member of the Chicago Outlaws from 1966 to 1967. Unlike Thompson, Danny Lyon doesn’t make an appearance as an author. The interviews seem like barely edited transcripts, while the photos of the rebellious beauty of the bikers are celebrated.

Jeff Nichols (TAKE SHELTER, LOVING) ...

When the partner of Canadian Joshua dies, he turns to artificial intelligence “Project December“ in his grief. He trains the chat-bot to answer like her using messages from his dead girlfriend. The surprisingly precise results gives Jason Rohrer, the developer of “Project December“ an idea. Chatting with the dead becomes a service, currently for 10 dollars. Joshua’s story and the “Jessica Simulation“ is reported on worldwide. In the documentary ETERNAL YOU, she is the entry point to a world of the virtual undead. The examples are both fascinating and frightening. Chat-bots, ...

Palantirí are the magical stones in Lord of the Rings that can communicate with each other and transmit messages over long distances. They are instruments of power in Tolkien's Middle Earth universe. The Palantir software from the US company Palantir Technologies is one of the most powerful and controversial data analysis tools in the world and is used by secret services and police authorities, the US military, banks, hedge funds and some large companies. The company's specialty is to standardize and combine information from gigantic data collections and to find relevant links in order to ...

Todd Haynes (CAROL, I’M NOT THERE, FAR FROM HEAVEN, SAFE) is one of the most renowned US independent directors. In his newest film MAY DECEMBER, he gradually unfurls the network of relationships, power relations, and traumas of an unusual family. Actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is meant to play the role of teacher Gracie (Julianne Moore) in a film about her affair and later marriage to her 13 year old former student. For research purposes, she visits Gracie, who was in prison due to the affair, and her family. Gracie is 59, her ex-student and current husband Joe (Charles Melton) is now ...

LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL directed by Australian brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes is a mock found footage film which presents itself as a TV talk show from the 70s: the disastrous late night show “Night Owls” with host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) is being shown, including behind-the-scenes scenes. It quickly becomes clear that Jack has attracted the interest of the lord of darkness. In the enchanting biographical introduction he tells of a visit to “The Grove” – a reference to the “Bohemian Grove” estate, which conspiracy theorists believe is the headquarters of elite US ...

As cute as the images of ROBOT DREAMS are, the feelings the film is about are mature, honest and touching. ROBOT DREAMS is about loneliness, grief, loss, about picking yourself up again, growing up, and friendship – those that don’t last and those that may open new perspectives. At the center is lonely “dog“ who plays Pong against himself alone in his apartment in 1980s New York and buys a robot assembly kit and builds a robot who becomes his best friend. Both of them are as happy together as friends can be, but then something happens that shakes up the life of “Dog“ and ...

Merrill Nisker aka Peaches jolted the Berlin underground sceene and gender politics in the early 2000s with her electro-clash-punk and spectacular DIY shows. A hairy, glittering whirlwind that elevated female sexuality from object of desire to bearer of desire. Songs like “Fuck the Pain Away“ became cult songs and are also the centerpiece of the doc. Judy Landkammer and Philipp Fussenegger accompany the Berliner-by-choice during her “The Teaches of Peaches Anniversary Tour“ in 2022 and contrast it with Peaches’ beginnings with the status quo as a queer-feminist artist and icon. ...

Two men, one woman, a tennis court. The camera races to one person, then to the other, searching wildly across the court, sweat dripping in the close-up, both of them getting into position in the long shot, the score by Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross blaring above. It’s all or nothing! Before we even meet his protagonists, Luca Guadagnino, the master stager, builds the most amount of tension. Little by little, the history of this all-important match, which will decide the future of the three, is revealed in interlaced flashbacks. Once again.

In college, Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh ...

Lissy is literally sitting in shit. She is terminally ill and has to take care of her husband Gerd who has Parkinson’s. The two of them manage to drive to go shopping, because Lissy can navigate without tremors and Gerd can see. But their life has become a breakneck, tough affair with an imminent end. Lissy actually views this quite soberly.

Director and screenwriter Matthias Glasner (Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at this year’s Berlinale) has directed a complex, emotionally devastating, long (183 minutes) drama with its share of funny moments. Glasner divides his very personal film ...

Alex Garland (EX MACHINA, ANNIHILATION) is the Denis Villeneuve of tomorrow. Garland makes films that lie between multiplex mainstream and arthouse, genre and avantgarde, and has quickly created a solid fan community. CIVIL WAR is a warning about the escalation of social conflicts in the US on the one hand, and a story about a hard-nosed war photographer (Kirsten Dunst, MELANCHOLIA), who takes a young, ambitious photographer (Cailee Spaeny, PRISCILLA) under her wings on the other – a classic western theme: older cowboy, younger cowboy. The narrow perspective of the photographers enables ...

“Back to Black“ is Amy Winehouse’s second studio album. with songs in which she buries her love for the musician (and husband of two years) Blake Fielder-Civil. The film by British director Sam Taylor-Johnson is about this fatal relationship. It doesn’t aim for anything more. BACK TO BLACK doesn’t psychologize. It avoids the possibility of something disturbing, it can’t get away from “Rehab,“ meaning drugs and depression, but is all the more dedicated to Amy the family person, her tattoos, her grandmother Nancy and father Mitch. He accompanies his daughter's legendary, but ...

Rural Italy has been the focus of two Alice Rohrwacher’s films. 2014‘s THE WONDERS is about a family of honey farmers and 2018‘s HAPPY AS LAZARRO is set in a tobacco plantation. LA CHIMERA is meant to close out the trilogy with a look into the world of Tuscan grave robbers in the 1980s. All three films deal with the question of how to handle the past which does not only inscribe itself in the people but also the land. Rohrwacher blends reality with poetic, almost fairy tale-like elements here too, merging Fellini’s fantasy with Italian neorealist cinema.

In LA CHIMERA, archaeologist ...

Between hypnotic and tough: in her most recent comedy, Jessica Hausner once again cultivates humor that is so evil that it is almost unrecognizable as humor and her very own elaborate, dry style. While the detailed, sophisticated color scene leans towards toxic pastel­ all of the protagonists in CLUB ZERO speak in such a flat way as if English is a foreign language to them. The modernist interior is just as stiff, somewhere between a VHS seminar room and Le Corbusier. Meanwhile, plot-wise and emotionally, everything gets out of hand: an international elite school hires renowned Miss Novak ...

MONKEY MAN, Dev Patel’s debut as a director (Patel is also the co-writer and main actor) was recently celebrated at the SXSW Festival. Patel’s film was meant to go directly to streaming on Netflix before Jordan Peele (GET OUT, NOPE) jumped in and brought the film to cinemas through his production company “Monkey Paw“ and his deal with Universal. The film belongs there, if only because Dev Patel (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, THE GREEN KNIGHT) is exactly the action hero that the world needs now. MONKEY MAN has fantastic images too, of course.

Patel, even in his younger, lankier days, always ...

Jonathan Demme’s STOP MAKING SENSE is considered to be one of the best concert films of all time, if not the best ever. The Talking Heads were at the absolute peak of their musical career in 1984. The trio made up of David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Franz, once a warm up band for The Ramones on the CBGB stage in New York, was now a nine-member new wave afro funk band that transcended genre and race categories, making music for everyone, like maybe only Funkadelic/Parliament or Sly and the Family Stone before them and nobody after. Byrne’s stage production traces the band’s career. ...

Neurotic, married university professor Paul Matthews (Nicholas Cage) teaches evolutionary biology and has been planning to publish big paper about the swarm intelligence of ants for years when old friend Sheila snatches the topic and has a bestseller without even mentioning Paul. Paul is enraged, but he is so unable to assert himself, and he lets Sheila rip him off.

No one takes Paul seriously, no one seems to see him. Students whisper in Paul’s lectures. His daughter is moody because Paul appeared in one of her dreams and just looked on as she had a car accident. People begin to recognize ...

An apartment building is on fire. Fire trucks rush to the site of the accident. Saori and her 11 year old son Minato watch the fire from their balcony. Then the narrative moves on from the fire, centers very different, more everyday stories, but the film will keep returning to this event, which has left an ominous shadow over the story and hints at a – past, imminent, present – catastrophe.

Saori and Minato have different worries. Since the death of his father, Minato has displayed erratic behavior. He cuts his hair, comes home with just one shoe, and one night he disappears completely. ...

LOVE IS THE DEVIL, John Maybury’s portrait of painter Francis Bacon, is fortunately being released in German cinemas. It premiered in 1998, when Daniel Craig, who plays Bacon’s lover George Dyer, wasn’t blonde yet. LOVE IS THE DEVIL is set in the 60s, when men, also gay men, didn’t wear designer underwear but rather underwear made of double ribbed cotton. White and chaste, very unsexy. So they stand opposite each other, Bacon and Dyer, not as two lovers, but two men in a duel, taking off their clothes... no, Maybury spares us the obligatory display of flesh, he changes the narrative ...

Hipgnosis is a combination of the words hip and gnostic (knowledge) and is also a pun on hypnosis. A meeting of contradictions, which Storn Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po“ Powell liked so much it went from being graffiti on their door to the name of their joint graphic design agency. SQUARING THE CIRCLE tells the story of Hipgnosis through Aubrey Powell’s eyes: starting out with smoking weed together as teens, the album cover of Pink Floyd’s “A Saucerful of Secrets,“ the rampant LSD consumption to the now iconic cover for “Dark Side of the Moon.“ From Peter Christopherson joining ...

DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS leaves you with a “how could this happen?“ feeling. Actually, everything is set up for a nice cinema success. Ethan Coen directed and wrote the screenplay, though without his brother Joel, but with editor Tricia Cooke who has been working with the Coens for decades. Three very likable young female stars are in the main roles: Margaret Qualley (POOR THINGS, “The Leftovers“) as overtly sexual chatterbox Jamie, Geraldine Viswanathan (CAT PERSON) as grumpy, uptight Marian and Beanie Feldstein (BOOKSMART) as the angry cop and slighted ex girlfriend Sukie. It’s about a ...

I.
In the autumn of 1943, SS Obersturmbannführer and judge Konrad Morgen was sent to Auschwitz in order to investigate claims of corruption and self-enrichment among the SS officers and squads. As a result, Rudolf Höß, the commander of the concentration and extermination camp, was removed from his post and moved to Berlin, to the supervisory authority of the concentration camp, the SS Central Economic-Administrative Office. It was regarded as a promotion for appearance’s sake, but it was actually a disciplinary transfer. Höß’ family, with whom he lived in the immediate vicinity of ...

The sun rises over London. In the window pane of a high-rise building, we see a man's face and his shirtless upper body gradually appear through the light’s double reflection. He turns, sits down by his computer and types: “suburban house, 1987.“ Then a fire alarm goes off. These first scenes in ALL OF US STRANGERS, the new film by Andrew Haigh (LOOKING, 45 YEARS) are the only ones that are most likely set in reality. The rest might be literature, memories, dreams, hallucinations, imaginings, or perhaps the story that Adam is currently writing.

Adam (Andrew Scott) leaves his building ...

On June 2017, translator and US Air Force Veteran Reality Winner is interrogated in her home by the FBI and ultimately arrested on suspicion of leaking classified documents. The then 26 year old women forwarded an intelligence analysis of the NSA about possible Russian interference in the 2016 US elections to the magazine “The Intercept.“

Before REALITY became a feature film, it was the material of a play called “Is This a Room,“ and before it was a play, it was an FBI document. Tina Satter, the director of the Broadway drama and the film, adheres to the transcript of the June 2017 ...

Milton is almost 80 and leads a quiet life in a small town in Pennsylvania. The town’s motto is A GREAT PLACE TO CALL HOME. Widower Milton seems satisfied with life, even if he barely has a social life. He blocks the contact of his contemporaries Joyce and Sandy. He’s peculiar. When he claims that a UFO landed in his flower bed in the supermarket, good-natured Sandy gets worried and visits him. To her amazement, she actually sees an alien sitting on Milton’s couch eating apple slices. Together with the prickly Joyce, the odd trio take on the alien because - despite the city's motto - it ...

The world of Bella Baxter (an unstoppable Emma Stone) is filled with fascinating details. There are embroidered reliefs made of snow white silk on the walls. On the ceiling, stucco forms an image of two intertwined ears. On the floors, there are inlays of different colored marble create patterns and creatures. Bella Baxter is in the process of discovering this world which seems infinite. In addition, she learns slowly, very slowly, to use language and move her body. The creator and ruler of this world is “Daddy-God“ Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a mad, brilliant inventor marked by scars ...

Despite all of their inadequacies, Alexander Payne has a weakness for the human species. His primarily male protagonists aren’t really all that pleasant, but by disclosing their weaknesses they become absolutely lovable. Whether it’s the pedantic pensioner Warren Smith in ABOUT SCHMIDT, the overwhelmed father in THE DESCENDANTS or the good-for-nothing son of an alcoholic father in NEBRASKA – they are all on a cathartic journey with the goal of reconciling with their miserable existence. Even though he remains a master of the tragicomedy, Payne remains an incorrigible humanist who looks ...

Almost Barbie: in the first shot of Sofia Coppola’s film PRISCILLA, Priscilla Beaulieu Presley sinks her barefoot into the soft carpets of Elvis Presley’s stiflingly plush residence “Graceland.“

When Priscilla Beaulieu Presley’s autobiography “Elvis and Me“ came out in 1985, Elvis had died less than 10 years before. The focus of the bestseller was on the wild behavior of Elvis and his entourage behind the doors of Graceland, but the book was also an apology. Elvis died three years after Priscilla left him. The rumor mill blamed her for the star’s downfall. Coppola’s film, ...

While a German crew is shooting a documentary in a Kurdish village, a turkish agent is faced with a mysterious force which is after his daughter.