The New Hollywood cinema of the early 60s and 70s and European auteur cinema of the same time is teeming with drifter figures – characters who drift, aimlessly, with no discernible reason nor social belonging, usually without money too. Barbara Loden shows us a female figure like that for the first time in her 1970 film WANDA. The film is the only one she directed. In the era of Coppola, Penn, and Scorsese, a female director was a rarity, and in the famous films of this era it’s hard to find a multi-layered female character. Wanda, played by Loden herself, has left her husband and ...

Oliver Hermanus’ film THE HISTORY OF SOUND is the the right film for hopeless romantics, incredibly sad but also comforting. The film is set in the early 20th century and is about Lionel (Paul Mescal), the son of a farmer, whose singing talent enables him to get a scholarship at a conservatory in Boston, and about his friendship – and love – for David (Josh O’Connor), who is studying composition and passionately collects old folk songs. After World War I, the two of them go on an expedition in Maine in order to record folk songs with a phonograph.

On their trip, David and Lionel are ...

It isn’t an easy endeavor, to capture the life and work of a person which mostly plays out hidden behind bookshelves and a desk in a cinematic way. Sabine Lidl's tender, resonant portrait of the renowned writer Siri Hustvedt ("What I Loved", "The Blazing World") achieves this and much more: in artful circular movements, it traces its paths around her life, writing and thinking. Interview scenes with her and companions follow short Super 8 style interludes – novel characters, who walk the pulsating streets of Manhattan as the writer’s alter egos, or interspersed animated sequences in ...

Ray (Alexander „Eric Northman“ Skarsgård) races by in a skin-tight black and wide motorcycle suit on rainy streets through the night. Curly haired Colin (Harry Melling) sings Christmas songs wearing a straw hat and suspenders in a pub with his acapella barbershop quartet. After the performance he watches the leather boys as they play darts in a corner of the pub. Ray is part of the gang. They meet for the first time at the bar. Ray orders chips and nods to Colin. After a confusing moment he understands – and wordlessly pays for the snacks for the gay BDSM biker gang.

It is the ...

They were Broadway’s dream couple: between 1919 and the early 1940s, Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart composed some of the biggest hits of the 20th century. Hart wrote the clever lyrics, Rogers composed the unforgettable melodies. They created evergreen songs like “My Funny Valentine“ and “Blue Moon.“ They wrote over 500 songs for countless musical successes. Director Richard Linklater has wanted to film Lorenz Hart’s tragic life for a long time, but it was only when his friend and regular Ethan Hawke reached the right age that it was time. As it so often happens, the impressive ...

Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up from a coma in a spaceship and can’t remember anything. Beside him are two dead colleagues and after doing some calculations he realizes that the “sun” that he’s seeing isn’t actually the sun but that he’s in a solar system light years aways from Earth, heading towards Tau Ceti. As he tries to get used to his new surroundings, his memories slowly start coming back. Piece by piece, he remembers a past where he was a simple physics teacher until an apocalyptic threat made his special expertise necessary. He’s still unclear on how he came to be ...

Bradley Cooper’s exacting look at a fragile relationship is reminiscent of Robert Altman’s films, remaining close to the people and plunging right into the thick of things. When the film starts, the relationship has just ended. While brushing her teeth in the bathroom, Tess (Laura Dern) soberly says to Alex (Will Arnett): “shall we call it?“ He soberly agrees and suggests to sleeps on the sofa. Tess says no. Both of them are visibly tired, exhausted from year-long conflicts that are felt without having to be verbalized. IS THIS THING ON? follows what happens after a separation which ...

It’s been clear that Richard Linklater internalized French New Wave films quasi intravenously since his debut SLACKER (1990). The spaced out characters in this episodic film who see the return of Krishna in The Smurfs and want to earn out money by selling Madonna’s pap smear don’t live in Paris, but Austin, but they were clearly heirs to François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel and Godard’s PIERROT LE FOU. Unlike any other director in the last 35 years, the nonchalance in Linklater’s films mirror the Nouvelle Vague films, the love for outsiders and improvisation and the belief in ...

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE by Mona Fastvold is one of the most striking Oscar snubs of 2026: the US musical about the life of sect leader Ann Lee is neither nominated for its lush visuals nor for its excellent score (Daniel Blumburg) nor for Amanda Seyfriend’s performance. She probably delivers the performance of her career in the role of the deeply afflicted ascetic with a Messiah complex that founded the religious „Shaker“ group in the 18th century and migrated to America. It remains apparent that the academy doesn’t give the same attention to women-led productions like they do to the ...

Actress Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut is based on the eponymous autobiographical novel by US writer Lidia Yuknavitch. In it she writes about the sexual abuse in her childhood, of the discover of words, and of water as escape. Of drugs, self-destruction, relationships. Self-healing and an encounter in a writing seminar with Ken Kesey – the author of “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.” Stewart wraps the narrative in dream-like images. Close-ups, 16 mm footage, reflections, quick cuts. She uses all of the tools in the analog film toolbox, but uses it in a cautious enough way so it ...

Josh Safide was considered a shoo-in for winning at least one Oscar for his film MARTY SUPREME until January 26th. Then an article was published in the tabloid rag “Page Six Hollywood” in which writer Tatiana Siegel alleges that the didn’t brothers separate due to “artistic development” but because of an incident on the set of GOOD TIME: In a sex scene, a 17 year old girl was hired who was meant to be naked in front of the camera with amateur actor Buddy Duress. Duress, who was high during the scene, allegedly undressed and asked the actress if he can “put it in.” Josh Sadie ...

FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER doesn’t just have a title that rhymes. Jim Jarmusch has made a poem about family relationships. In three chapters that work like three stanzas, adult children visit their parents. At first glance, the stories don’t have much in common besides the basic constellation, but like quiet echoes, small, recurring events, sentences and thoughts run through the film, connecting the scenarios. A few skaters go by on the sidelines of every episode, like migratory birds, en route at a different flow than the protagonists that navigate the strange standstill that family ...

Somewhere in the rainbow fog of the gay universe lies Planet Clitopia – hard to find for beginners. The cool and dazzling queen and queen reign here, who enjoy immense popularity. Quite unlike their daughter, Princess Saira: introverted and lacking in self-confidence, she doesn't even possess a magical labrys, the mythical double axe of the Amazons and an absolute must-have in this solar system. When Saira’s super hot bounty hunter girlfriend Kiki breaks up with her after just two weeks, the princess is destroyed. But fate gifts her with an opportunity to take her life into her own hands. ...

After THE RIDER and NOMADLAND, Chloé Zhao arrived at the cineast Mount Olympus. THE RIDER was the better film, but NOMADLAND won the Academy Awards, also because of Frances McDormand’s star power. Then came the catastrophe, which probably only turned out to be relatively mild because people who like Chloé Zhao's films usually don't watch "Marvel" superhero movies. THE ETERNALS was a bad idea from the start, the original comic was boring, a product of its time, when everything bad about youth was blamed on soul-corrupting comics, and publishers defended themselves by incorporating all ...

Working as a housemaid for the rich Winchester family seems like a dream come true at first for Millie (Sydney Sweeney). Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) is warm, the house is beautiful and pristine, the man of the house Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) is a feast for the eyes and her tasks – cleaning, cooking, and taking nine year old Cecilia to the ballet – are all doable. Even the little room in the attic seems divine to Millie, who recently lost her job and place and has been living in a car. But it is weird that you can only lock it from the outside and that the window doesn’t open, ...

Neil Diamond might be one of the most successful songwriters of all time, but he didn’t really gain traction in Europe. Diamond belong to the generation of songwriters like Carole King, and like King he worked in the Brill Building, the hit factory of the 60s. Diamond wrote pop hits for The Monkees (“I’m A Believer“), and filled stadiums with older fans from the 70s on. In the 90s a hint of a revival when the hardcore band Urge Overkill was featured on the PULP FICTION soundtrack, which was ubiquitous for months, with their cover version of Neil Diamond's “Girl, You'll Be A Woman ...

Loneliness is so widespread in urban Japan that there’s even a state organized ministry against the consequences of being alone since 2021. At the same time, psychological therapy is far less normalized in Japan than it is in the US or Europe. This is how the first “Rental Family Service“ launched in the early 90s – a service in which actors can be rented out for platonic relationships. In RENTAL FAMILY, director Mitsuyo Miyazaki, known under the pseudonym Hikari, tells the story of Phillip (Brendan Fraser), a failed commercial actor from the USA, who comes into contact with the ...

Agnes and Lydie have been close friends since their college days. While Lydie moved to New York, Agnes works as a literature professor at her old university in New England. Despite her career success, her life seems to be standing still in contrast to Lydie. Not only has her location and relationship status remained unchanged, she also lives in the same house that she now shares with her cat Olga instead of Lydie. Between the lighthearted, teasing conversations between the two, Lydie's caring nature and Agnes's insecurity suggest that Agnes is not simply lazing under the sofa blanket, but is ...

What does it mean to be a popstar, to always be on the road and in the public eye 24/7? Abel Tesfaye just tried to show what it means to be The Weeknd in HURRY UP TOMORROW, a mixture between concert film and drama. In LURKER, which celebrated its premiere at the Berlinale, director and screenwriter Alex Russell asks the question from the perspective of a fan, though Matthew ((Théodore Pellerin) isn’t actually familiar with Oliver’s (Archie Madakwe) music when he comes to the clothing store where Matthew works. A relaxed, friendly relationship develops between the two and the ...

Sisters Agnes (Inga Ibsbotter Lilleaas) and Nora (Renate Reinsve) share a love for the red storybook house of their childhood. When their mother dies, their father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) suddenly stands right outside the door after years of absence. The eccentric director wants to use the house where he grew up for the shoot of his long-awaited, possibly last film. His older daughter Nora is meant to play the main role and finally leave the theater stage, where she is plagued by stage fright that is nerve-wracking for everyone. But Nora declines to embody Gustav’s mother, her ...

Instead of filming the entire Odyssey, which is allegedly what Christopher Nolan is planning on doing, Uberto Pasolini has adapted the last chapter of the most important literary text in literary history. In doing so, he attempts to set the story among modern people, with modern inner conflicts. He tells a different story than Homer, even though many elements, scenes, and characters have remained. The ODYSSEY is a story of pretense, subterfuge, and revenge. THE RETURN is about trauma, guilt, and forgiveness. The most important difference is that there aren’t any Gods here, not Zeus, ...

Ari Aster has made a name of himself as an excellent horror director with the occult masterpieces HEREDITARY (2018) and MIDSOMMAR (2019). Their success paved the way for him to make his very own kind of films. His last film BEAU IS AFRAID (2023) sent Joaquin Phoenix on an unusual psycho-roller coaster. In EDDINGTON he also goes deep into the disturbing worlds of his characters and delivers a vitriolic commentary on the US present by doing so. The plot is set in a very specific time, May 2020, when the Covid pandemic swept across the world and called into question everything that was thought ...

You can’t accuse Osgood Perkins of being lazy. When the filming of the Stephen King adaptation THE MONKEY was interrupted due to the US strike, he just drove across the border to Canada, looked for a small cast and crew there, and shot the chamberpiece KEEPER. The premise is appropriately simple: Liz (Tatiana Maslany, “She-Hulk: Attorney at Large) and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) go to a remote wooden cabin that belongs to Malcolm’s family to celebrate their one year anniversary. It is clear that this won’t be a pleasant trip from the start of the film, when we see a series of short ...

The short, dense novel “Die, My Love“ by Ariana Harwicz is written as an inner monologue. The observations, feelings, and set pieces of a family story are wildly strung together as they tumble through the mind of a young mother on the verge of psychosis. A stranger appears there whose gaze at the woman is also in her imagination. Frustration, contempt, violence, and sexuality simmer beneath the text, and the anchoring of what is said in an external reality becomes increasingly questionable.

Director Lynne Ramsay likes to explore extreme psychological situations in her films. In ...

ANNIVERSARY tries to show the madness of an authoritarian movement by the impact it has on a bourgeois family. The dramaturgical model is based on Chekhov's plays. Professor Ellen and her husband Paul, a successful restaurant owner, are having a family gathering. Lesbian daughter Anna is a comedian with a rock star demeanor, daughter Cynthia and her husband Rob are engaged, left-wing lawyers, daughter “Birdie” puts stars on her face and looks at the world with bewildered puppy eyes. Son Josh, a failed writer, has brought his new girlfriend, Elizabeth, who seems kind of unhinged from the ...

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 ...