Teddy (Jesse Plemons) who works as a packer in a factory, and his mentally handicapped cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) are planning to save the world. In order to do so, the two are planning on kidnapping the head of a gigantic corporation that Teddy also works for. Teddy is certain that she’s an alien who is planning on destroying the world. Michelle (Emma Stone) is a very confident, successful woman with both martial arts and marketing skills. Teddy and Don are poor, grimy losers who live in the decrepit house of Teddy’s absent mother and seem to be sinking deeper and deeper into madness. ...

Ben Leonberg says it took him 400 shooting days to film his 73 minute debut. That’s due to his protagonist, the director’s dog, a Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever named Indy, which won him the “Howl of Fame Award” invented just for him for the best dog acting at the SXSW Film Festival. Indy is a loyal and lovable dog, not the youngest anymore, and his prevailing mood is being worried. With distrustful, squinty eyes, he follows his very ill master Todd, as he moves back to the remote estate of his dead grandfather. While Todd doesn’t seem to notice anything unusual, Indy takes in ...

Guillermo Del Toro loves monster stories and fabulous, mythical creatures, which he has created in films like PAN’s LABYRINTH or his Oscar winning THE SHAPE OF WATER. His fascination with science and technology often plays a role too. Now the Mexican director has fulfilled his longtime dream which unites all of his passions with a lavish new interpretation of Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein” – backed by Netflix, but in its grandiose staging is clearly meant for the cinema.

Del Toro’s reverence for the original text is inscribed in the imposing epic, yet the film does carry ...

Classy jazz ripples quietly. Autumn is lit in subtle warm colors that also determine the landscape, the cars, sweaters and knit dresses. THE MASTERMIND is set in 1970, but you barely notice that, because the nonchalance and confidence of the elegant, well-dressed bourgeois-bohemians that populate Kelly Reichardt’s film are timeless. The most nonchalant of them all is James Mooney (Josh O’Connor), the judge’s son with artistic ambitions. Every step and every gesture seems to be just right when he checks out the local art gallery and casually steals a small figurine. The bigger robbery ...

The clock is ticking in Luca Guadagnino’s AFTER THE HUNT – it’s unclear for who. The threatening sound of a time bomb about to explode repeatedly overlays the soundtrack. A disturbing element of suspense that the Italian director prominently uses without ever solving the mystery. This is exemplary of this film, which hints at many things but doesn’t explain much.

The key figure in the film is the charismatic philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts). It isn’t a given to her that she’s teaching at the prestigious Yale University. Her confident demeanor on campus is founded ...

When it comes to guardian angels, Gabriel (Keanu Reeves) isn’t exactly playing in the big leagues. He does have the fitting white wings on his back, along with a trench coat, but his assignment is limited to preventing car accidents caused by cell phone use while driving in Los Angeles. Then he meets Arj (Aziz Ansari) – and makes the young man his new mission.

Arj is quite disillusioned by life. Along with his badly paid job at a hardware store, he also uses an app to hire him for all kinds of jobs, including from the well-heeled tech entrepreneur Jeff (Seth Rogen). It’s not enough to ...

Fatih Akin’s third collaboration with Hark Bohm, who worked together with him on AUS DEM NICHTS and TSCHICK, is in the same vein as Bohm’s fantastic youth films like NORDSEE IS MORDSEE, MORITZ, LIEBER MORITZ or TSCHETAN, DER INDIANERJUNGE. AMRUM depicts the childhood memories of Hark Bohm, and is primarily a children’s film, but also a film that tells adults something about the perception of children at the end of the war. Most of all, AMRUM is a North German film, Akin and his cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub (INDEPENDENCE DAY), who grew up in Bremen but is a Hollywood veteran, ...

Benny Safdie’s THE SMASHING MACHINE won the Silver Lion Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Based on real events, ex-wrestler Dwayne Johnson plays the mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr, a star of the scene in the 90s, before the sport became popular in the US. Kerr rarely fights in the US, more often in Brazil, where the sport known as “Vale Tudo“ has been popular since the 20s, and in Japan. There isn’t a lot of money to be earned, the main prize, which Mark Kerr is competing for in Japan, is 200,000 Dollars. Safdie doesn’t linger on Mark Kerr’s success for long. After 20 ...

Since their first feature AMER (2009), directing duo Helène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have released a new film every four years or so. Their films are nominated at festivals, but they mostly win in technical categories. This isn’t totally surprising. Like the recently departed David Lynch, Cattet & Forzani make very individual, intense, polarizing films. They create a homage to a film genre, concentrate and fragment the corresponding images and sounds and the narrative set pieces to create a (according to Bruno Forzani) “orgasmic“ film experience. REFLECTIONS IN A DEAD DIAMOND is ...

Christian Petzold’s new film is named after a music piece, “Miroirs No. 3” by Maurice Ravel. The piece is played by Paula Beer’s character Laura in the film, but the actual musical leitmotif in this film is different, namely the northern soul dance floor banger “The Night“ by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (1972). The song is played three times, just one of the three mirrorings in this film. Frankie Vallis “The Night” is a song with chasms. It begins with a brutal bass line, which, after the first run-through, is underpinned by a weeping Hammond organ and a tambourine ...

There’s hardly a museum of contemporary art that doesn’t have a room with an old, illuminated CRT television. The installations have titles like Zen for TV (1963) or Video Fish (1975) and are in every case by Nam June Paik, a founder of so-called media art. The medium of television, especially antique CRT televisions, may seem like anything but contemporary these days. But Paik’s reflections on the dependence of continuous entertainment and the flood of information and his research on self-determined, mindful alternatives can easily refer to today’s discourse on the addiction ...

“He was killed by a racist – and the racism continues.” This is how Armin Kurtović describes the period after the right-wing extremist attack on February 19 2020 in Hanau wherein his son Hamza and eight other people with migration backgrounds were murdered. DAS DEUTSCHE VOLK is told from the perspective of those affected, showing the consequences of the crime and the fight against the institutional racism that enabled it. Director Marcin Wierzchowski followed them for around three years with a camera, from the scene of the crime in Hanau to the family’s countries of origin.
It was ...

A farm in the Altmark region has been home to young women for centuries. At the beginning of the 20th century Alma and her sisters lived there, followed by young Erika in the 1940s, teenager Angelika in the GDR of the 1980s, and finally Nelly and Lenka in the here and now, whose parents wanted to move their family from Berlin to the countryside. What connects the women across the generations is not just the location or a twig in the family tree. Their lives are linked by an invisible bond, a recurring experience. A hint of past events that moves through the farmstead like a shimmer. Shocks, ...

Martin Schoeller’s close ups and portraits of famous people in art and politics have made him famous. He also photographed Trump before he decided to become a politician. But that’s not what Josephine Links’ WE ALL BLEED RED is about. She is the half sister of the Munich-born artist who has lived in New York for 30 years and so has a special, intimate perspective on him. Links shows what’s important to him, what he uses his reputation and his money from popular magazines on. She watches him at work with those who aren’t rich (but not necessarily happy).

The celebrities aren’t ...

Magician Mr. K (Crispin Glover) just wants to spend one night at the remote, wildly overgrown castle hotel. But the reception itself is already strange: the surly receptionist ignores Mr. K's question about whether it is far to the café where he is to perform the next day. This is a proper house, he shouldn’t make trouble, she warns him. Arriving in his room, the magician finds an old man under his bed – and a chambermaid in the closet. If that wasn’t strange enough, shortly after, a brass band emerges from an inconspicuous door in the wall and marches through the halls with a ...

On August 3rd 2021, the Taliban marched into Kabul, which had been abandoned by US and NATO troops, and seized power in Afghanistan for the second time since 1996. The Berlin-based Egyptian filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at arrived in Kabul shortly after, after coming to an agreement with the Taliban. He will follow Taliban air force commander Mawlawi Mansour and his lieutenant M. Javid Mukhtar for a year. He will never be unaccompanied and can only film what the Taliban allowed him to see.

Nash’at spoke with the Taliban with the help of a translator who told him he doesn’t want to know what ...

TOGETHER is based on two ideas that are hard to combine. On one hand, it’s about the Platonic myth of the split person who spends their life searching for the other half. This is taken very literally here. On the other hand, it’s a relationship story between teacher Millie (Alison Brie, “Mad Men,” “Glow”) and guitarist Tim (Dave Franco) who are moving from the city to a backwater town. Alison Brie, the best, funniest, scariest US actress, equips her character with a staggering, permanent kind of upbeatness and positions her Millie on the border between dream girl and manic ...

A focal point of Stephen King narratives is the motif of a boy and a girl dancing in a US small town, ideally on a sports field, a baseball or football field or a gym where the high school dances take place. From “Carrie” to “Christine” to King’s Kennedy novel “11.22.63,” the image repeats itself as the apex of precarious, but in the moment absolute, innocent happiness. For King, this exists alongside similar visions of small town America where nice people stand by each other and chat on the terrace and garden fences on summer evenings. King’s communitarian utopia seemed ...

The story of Grace Pudel is incredibly sad. One calamity after the other. Her mother dies, then her father becomes an alcoholic. Grace is bullied at school, and only her brother Gilbert stands by her, but when their father also dies, the two children, who were each other’s worlds, are separated. While Grace grows up with a disinterested nudist couple who try to heal their troubles with self-help books, Gilbert goes to the other end of Australia to an evangelical farmer family and has to work in apple production all day. And so it continues. Grace sinks into depression and begins to hoard ...

THE SALT PATH is a travel film based on the eponymous bestseller by Raynor Winn, in which Winn wrote about her experience of hiking with her husband Moth, who suffers from incurable degenerative neuropathy, along the South West Coast Path, which runs for around 1,000 kilometers around the southwest coast of England. The difference between similar illness travel films: Ray (Gillian Anderson, “Sex Education”, “The X Files”) and Moth (Jason Isaacs, THE DEATH OF STALIN, “The White Lotus”) aren’t traveling by choice, but because their farm and entire possessions have been pawned. ...

“All of his portraits of me are lies. They are all Picassos. None of them are Dora Maar.” This is what the photographer and painter Maar allegedly said about the paintings that her ex Pablo Picasso painted of her.

LEONORA IN THE MORNING LIGHT by Thor Klein and Lena Vurma, the first feature about surrealist British-Mexican artist Leonora Carrington (1919-2011), is based on the eponymous novel by Michaela Carter, which is named after the portrait that Max Ernst did of Carrington in 1940. In 1947, Carrington and Ernst met each other in Paris; she was 19, he was 47. They were together for ...

Edward (James McArdle) is a nice man, slightly depressed, chronically indecisive and unable to say no to anyone. He has just published his first novel, a semi-autofictional story about a gay coming-of-age in Ireland, and his publisher has planned a big promotional tour in the US. However, this is a problem because Edward takes care of his mother Alma (Fionnula Flanagan) who has lost the ability to speak after a stroke, but with the help of her iPad she can speak up in a virtuoso and very determined manner. Edward’s three best friends have also taken on the role of “childless auntie” in ...

“It’s a hotel but in name, and facilities“ – this is one of Charles’ (Tim Key) more sophisticated jokes. The eccentric lottery winner, who leads quite a lonely life on a Welsh island, specializes in puns, which he strings together mercilessly and almost untranslatably. He’s also a mega fan of the band McGwyer/Mortimer, a folk singer songwriter duo, that broke up years ago. Herb McGwyer (Tom Badsan) is still a musician, but does disco that none of his old fans like. Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) gave up on music and is together with a friendly ornithologist. Charles has lured both ...

An unusual mother-daughter pair spends the summer far away from their native England on the Spanish coast: Rose wants to get treated by miracle doctor Gomez to heal her mysterious condition, Sofia wants to finally finish her anthropology degree. The sun is smoldering, the wind is blowing, the chained up dog next door can’t stop barking – and the nerves of these two women are getting more and more frayed by the minute. While Rose claims to get new diseases all the time and celebrates her fragility, Sofia begins to rebel against her role as a nurse. One day, she meets tourist Ingrid on the ...

1971. The Beatles are broken up, Richard Nixon is the president and employed the National Guard against students at Kent State University in the last summer, four died. The Vietnam War continues. At a protest in Ithaca Prison, 40 people are shot by guards. Right-wing extremist presidential candidate George Wallace is shot at. John Lennon and Yoko Ono still live in a small New York apartment. “The Flower Power generation is over, but we can start again, right?” Yoko Ono said in an interview. On the phone, the CIA surveillance equipment is crackling. A planned tour to raise bail for ...

“When did the first women’s soccer championship take place?“ US professional soccer player Brandi Chastain is asked. "1991" is the immediate, obvious answer. When Chastain sees clips from 1971 showing international women's teams playing in sold-out stadiums, she is stunned. "Why didn't I know about this?"

COPA 71 tells the moving and scandalous story of the other first women’s soccer world championship, the “1971 Campeonato de Fútbol Femenil” in Mexico, where teams from Denmark, Mexico, Italy, Britain, Argentina, and France took part.

There’s a lot to tell – from the ...

He is an uncompromising freedom fighter, is considered to be a Swiss national hero, and is feared by students in German junior highs. In the last century, his myth has been adapted countless times across all media. I’m talking about Wilhelm Tell (Claes Bang), the master marksman who not only shot an apple off his son's head, but also freed Switzerland from the oppression of the Habsburg Emperor (Ben Kingsley) and his henchman Gessler.

Director and screenwriter Nick Hamm adaptated the 1804 play by Friedrich Schiller as an epic historical drama that was already aptly compared to BRAVEHEART ...

Ang Lee’s THE WEDDING BANQUET – awarded with the Golden Bear and Oscar nominated – wasn’t just the Taiwanese director’s breakthrough, it was also a small and important milestone in the depiction of Asian and homosexual characters on screen. The film left a mark on the Korean-American filmmaker Andrew Ahn when he was a child – and in the new THE WEDDING BANQUET he now tells a similar, albeit significantly modernized, story inspired by it.

When the student visa of gay Korean Min (Han Gi-chan) runs out, he proposes to his boyfriend Chris (Bowen Yang) in order to stay and so he ...

After its Cannes premiere, Finnish film critic Joonatan Itkonen wrote that THE PHEONICIAN SCHEME was Anderson’s most successful attempt at “crafting a stop-motion animation in reality“ and that’s an apt way to describe his newest feature. As if wound up, Anderson's characters purr at right angles through sets that look like dollhouses, rattling off their rapid-fire dialogue like those coin-operated machines that tell fairy tales. The plot is as linear as a to do list: the very assassination- prone uber oligarch Zsa Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) has a megalomaniac business plan which ...

In the Moroccan mountains. Touda is a Sheikah singer who can barely keep herself and her deaf son afloat. Her career doesn’t make a lot of money nor is it respected in patriarchal society – and it even exposes her to sexual violence. The tradition of Sheikah singers has its origins in the colonial era, a text at the beginning of the film explains. The songs are about resistance and emancipation, but also love and desire from a female perspective. For some (men) this is enough to consider the singers fair game or outlaws. This goes for Touda’s brother too. Despite her parent’s ...

Long hair and mustache, wading through a cornfield, a beetle on the fingertip, skinny dipping in the lake: it’s only the long robe of protagonist Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landy Jones) that hints at the fact that this isn’t an LSD trip at the Fusion Festival, but about a farmer in 18th century England.

Back in the village, the natural idyll is shattered, Thirsk experiences the inferno of a burning barn and the first divisions in the dense collective of the farming community, which will continue to open up over the course of the film. The loss of peasant livelihoods, which HARVEST recounts, is ...

A masturbating bog body, a brain the size of a small car, AI hunting for a pedophile politician, and a never-ending supply of salami – no absurdity can stop the G7 summit in the German village of Dankerode.

In RUMOURS, director Guy Maddin, along with his colleagues Evan and Galen Johnson, sends the seven heads of state of the “most important” democratic industrial nations to their annual summit. The goal is to overcome an incredibly important but undefined crisis. Above all, the personified nations – a condition that only France seems to be aware of – have to write a text that ...

The plan is to spend 28 days in a pressure chamber and underwater in the North Sea, working on gas pipes where the pressure must not drop, 90 meters below sea level. No light, black, and cold. Then four days of decompression. Three teams in three narrow pipes. Toilets, sinks, three bunks, a padded bench by a table. Chris (Finn Cole), Duncan (Woody Harrelson), Dave (Simu Liu). The pressure chamber quickly fills up. The roaring, loud hissing sound when as the gas mixture enters: "I'll never get used to that," says Chris. If someone leaves the chamber without decompressing, the gas quickly ...

Johanne writes about falling in love for the first time. It’s an in-depth, very intimate story that began a year ago, when she was in a vacation cabin with her mom and a friend and she had to say in the cabin because she was sick and read a book which made her feel tingly. A year later she experiences the same feeling when she gets a new teacher who almost has her name: Johanna. Johanne’s story has a lot of details, for example, how Johanna always wears artfully hand-knitted sweaters, and how she feels when she sees the coarse wool on Johanna’s soft skin. Johanne begins to look for ...

Tom (Sam Riley) had a promising career as a tennis professional ahead of him, if it weren’t for his shoulder injury. His 20s are now behind him and he lives alone in a hotel on Fuerteventura where he spends his time working as a tennis trainer. Nights are spent partying, drinking, and having one night stands, the days are spent feeling hungover and unchallenged. But when the Maguire family checks in to the hotel, it takes him out of his routine: not only does their son Anton (Dylan Torrell) immediately get on well with his new tennis teacher, Tom also seems to have a close, albeit ...

A British man and a penguin meet in Argentina. Admittedly: you need a lot of good will to go along with this premise with no judgment. The fact that the 2016 memoir by Tom Michell titled “The Penguin Lessons” became a bestseller, proves that it can work. In the adaptation by screenwriter Jeff Pope (PHILOMENA) and director Peter Cattaneo (THE FULL MONTY), Steve Coogan plays English teacher Michel, who arrives at an elite college on the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1976. Beyond the fine wood-paneled classrooms, the manicured lawns, and the sunny terraces of the school grounds, unrest is ...

WHAT MARIELLE KNOWS is about the most German problem of all: overcoming Kantian idealism. Prepubescent Marielle gets slapped by a friend who calls her a “slut.” Afterwards, she develops telepathic abilities, but only when it comes to her parents. She sees everything they talk about and do throughout the day and tells them about it over dinner.

For mother Julia (Julia Jentsch), who does something or other in a glass office, is especially embarrassed by her hardcore flirting during the smoke break with her colleague Max, for her father and publishing manager Tobias, he’s embarrassed by ...

Photographer Ernest Cole was one of the most important documentarists of the Apartheid in South Africa. He photographed everyday life of Apartheid, often covertly and under considerable danger: benches, water dispensers, stairs, restaurants, and bars, all labeled with “whites only” or “Black and coloured.” The photographs show the arbitrariness of the police, of passses and IDs that could be confiscated at any moment. Maybe the most striking images are the hostile looks that Cole captures when white South Africans discover his camera.

In 1967 he was able to emigrate to New York, ...

WARFARE can be seen as a counterpart to Alex Garland’s previous film CIVIL WAR. Where CIVIL WAR showed an epic journey across the US during a fictional civil war, WARFARE is a highly focused story based on the personal memories of a military special unit during the second invasion of Iraq, and especially those of co-director Ray Mendoza. In November 2006, Mendoza's team entered a residential building in embattled Ramadi to monitor the neighborhood from a sniper's nest. After an initial period of waiting and routine, the soldiers were suddenly attacked, and the team was ambushed while ...

Ron Howard is a renowned US director who has made dozens of successful films, among them WILLOW, RUSH, A BEAUTIFUL MIND, APOLLO 13, THE DA VINCI CODE and the adaptation of the autobiography of current US Vice President James David (JD) Vance, HILLBILLY ELEGY: What does Howard want with the forgotten “Galapagos Affair,” in which German settlers died under unclear circumstances on the Galapagos island of Floreana in 1934 and three other people disappeared?

Howard uses text at the start of the film giving context with the financial crisis and rising fascism. Berlin doctor Friedrich Ritter ...

The premise of Fleur Fortunés’ sci fi film is reminiscent of a Black Mirror episode: in a barren post-apocalyptic world that looks like the Canary Islands, several survivors have created a home. The air is constantly monitored for toxicity, there’s clean water, technologically produced food and medicine against radiation and ageing. The number of children is strictly limited so that there’s enough for everyone. Mia (Elizabeth Olson) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel) are on the shortlist for parenthood – she is a highly gifted biologist and he works on virtual 3D pets and is currently trying ...

The oeuvre of filmmaker and scholar Joshua Oppenheimer isn’t massive, but two out of his three documentaries are pioneering works in the cinema landscape. THE ACT OF KILLING (2012) and THE LOOK OF SILENCE (2014) are both about the systematic mass murders under Suharto in Indonesia (1965-1966) that claimed around 2-3 million victims. In THE ACT OF KILLING, Oppenheimer has the perpetrators reenact their deeds while THE LOOK OF SILENCE is from the perspective of the victims. Both films offer striking studies into human cruelty and trauma. With THE END, Oppenheimer has made his first feature ...

A remote area in Virginia: shortly before mom Laura (Andrea Riseborough) has to start chemotherapy, 20 year old Charlie (Morgan Saylor) moves in to take care of her and her chicken farm. The atmosphere is tense. While Laura is an organic farmer who saved all her chickens from the slaughterhouse because they were due to be sorted out due to their age and dwindling “egg production,” Charlie is studying international finance. She can’t understand how her mother can be happy on this unprofitable farm, let alone with all of the chickens who walk around the house.

When directing duo Hannah ...

I LIKE MOVIES is the fun debut of Canadian Chandler Levack, who is primarily a film critic. Her film is set in 2002 in a Toronto suburb. Chandler’s alter ego in the film is the short, chubby high school senior Laurence (Isaiah Lehtinen), a film nerd who dreams of becoming a filmmaker. Laurence applied to NYU so he could study film with Todd Solondz. He defends this, staunchly and angrily, as his only option in life. Nothing less will do, especially not studying film studies in Ottawa, for which he would receive a scholarship, while the NYU tuition costs $90,000, which his mother doesn't ...

Pamela Anderson is Shelly, the oldest dancer in one of the oldest revue shows in Las Vegas. Shelly has been part of the “Razzle Dazzle“ Ensemble for 30 years, and now the show is closing. This means that Shelly isn’t only only losing her job, but also her social environment and ultimately her place in the world. Anderson plays Shelly as a tough person who has advocated for herself in show business for 30 years on one hand, and on the other, as someone naive and dreamy. Time and again, she sacrificed security and family for the dream of glamour and happiness performing and she would ...

Andrzej Żuławski’s POSSESSION is a strange hybrid film wherein the way it avoids clear categorization is part of its charm. In the beginning, Anna (Isabelle Adjani) tells her husband, spy Mark (Sam Neill), that she wants a divorce because she has a new lover. After Mark recovers from his shock, he confronts her new beau, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), a spiritually detached intellectual, only to find out from him that Anna is committed to another lover with her body and soul. Who or what the lover is, Heinrich doesn’t know, but the answer grows on the wall.

POSSESSION is a divorce drama, a ...

The animated film FLOW by Gints Zilbalodis has no dialogue and it doesn’t need any to follow what is happening from the first to the last minute. In the world of FLOW, illustrated in rich colors and with great detail, there is a strange emptiness: people are missing. A black cat sneaks through a house that looks like it has been hastily abandoned, while outside it drizzles, then pours with rain. The path becomes a torrent and the water keeps rising. The animals flee in droves and the cat climbs higher and higher until at the last moment it is able to save itself on an abandoned sailboat, ...