Clint Eastwood’s new courtroom film is about a young man, Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), whose wife is about to give birth. He is appointed as a jury member and quickly realizes that the accused is innocent because he himself is responsible for the victim’s death.

The case of district attorney Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) is abysmally constructed. The accused was seen fighting with his girlfriend, the victim, and an old man allegedly saw him at the scene of the crime at the time of the crime. Character diagnoses and an unreliable witness, nothing more than that. Whether it was the ...

Director and cinematographer Thomas Riedelsheimer ist most known for his film RIVERS AND TIDES, ANDY GOLDSWORTHY WORKING WITH TIME (2000) which was about the landscape art of Goldsworthy. In simpler times 25 years ago, when a certain romanticism was still flourishing and people felt more like they needed calm in the face of radical change than, as they do today, comfort and support in the face of impending radical changes, this was well received. Riedelsheimer’s new film TRACING LIGHT is partially similar to RIVERS AND TIDES. The film tries to get to the secret of light or mystifying light, ...

Robert Eggers' films are concerned, on the one hand, with being as historically accurate as possible, and, on the other hand, with the contrast between historical myths, self-descriptions, and historical psychology versus current psychology. This is the case for all of Eggers previous films, THE VVITCH, THE NORTHMAN and THE LIGHTHOUSE, but also for Eggers’ version of NOSTERATU.

NOSFERATU, given the additional title DER UNTOTE (trans. The Undead) by the German distributor, is an adaptation of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's NOSFERATU - EINE SYMPHONIE DES HORROR (1921), which in turn was the ...

The desire to dissolve into the other, to merge with one another – after I AM LOVE, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME and BONES AND ALL, with QUEER as his latest, it is crystal clear that this is the glowing core around which Luca Guadagnino's cinematic work revolves. With the adaptation of William S. Burrough’s eponymous novel, not only did he fulfill a lifelong dream, but he also generously gifted his audience. Once again he proves himself to be a highly concentrated painter who makes the canvas shake with nervously shimmering brushstrokes: each individual image becomes a captivating painting that ...

Little Robert is bad at soccer and is bullied by the other boys. He’s happiest watching TV at grandma’s, he’s talented as the class clown, and he dreams of becoming an entertainer – just like his father, who left his family in order to go on pub tours. Robert longingly waits for a call from him – actually for his entire life. Robert's big moment comes when he makes it through the casting for Take That, more through audacity than through his boring audition, and his career as Robbie with the boy band skyrockets. The pop biopic beats follow: big egos, clashes in the band, drugs, ...

Mumbai at night. While the camera drives past and captures a market and the hustle and bustle of the streets, various people tell us off-screen what made them move to the Indian megacity: a fight with their father or a secret pregnancy. Only after the introduction, the film’s setting in this place of hope for a better life, for work and money, is when the actual, fictional story of three women begins, for which director and screenwriter Payal Kapadia received the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes 2024.

In the megalopolis, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) works as a nurse. Besides her job, which she ...

Robert Zemeckis loves to tell stories and combine them with technical innovation. CAST AWAY, THE POLAR EXPRESS, WHAT LIES BENEATH, and most recently THE WALK were all visually exceptional and broke new ground. Protagonist Tom Hanks was often by his side. The six-time Oscar winning FORREST GRUMP rested on his shoulders, for example. For HERE, he gathered the old FORREST GUMP gang back again. Along with Hanks there’s also Robin Wright on board. The screenplay was written by Zemeckis and Eric Roth again. Dan Burgess is behind the camera, Alan Silverstri did the music. Almost even greater than ...

Ann (director Joanna Arnow) is preparing a depressing dinner for herself by squeezing her ready-made curry from the ready-made bag into a pan. The mostly static camera follows Ann for an uncomfortably long time as she gets the last of the brown-green mush out..
Ann makes dinner for herself many times in the film. She is also often stark naked and bored lying next to her year-long BDSM partner Allen (Scott Cohen) and has conversations that seem to go unheard in the room. “I like that you’re not really interested in me,” Ann says. “Hmm,” says Allen. The routine sex dates with other ...

THE OUTRUN is Saoirse Ronan’s film. She isn’t just the protagonist, she also produced the film based on the autobiographical book of British journalist Amy Liptrop. Her enthusiasm for the project is palpable in every scene.

Alcoholic and unemployed biologist Rona (Saoirse Ronan) returns to the Orkney Islands at 30 in order to get sober and help her mentally ill father with his sheep after experiencing her rock bottom in London. She lives with her deeply devout mother and is badly hurt. Memories of her difficult childhood in Orkney, her life in London, and her relationship with Daynin ...

Shy Edward (Sebastian Stan), whose face is full of tumors, lives in a grimy New York. When pretty Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) moves in next to him and shows interest in Edward, he undergoes a dangerous medical procedure which has his facial skin fall off in shreds. Beneath it, a smooth, attractive face is revealed. Instead of revealing himself to Ingrid, Edward gives himself a new identity. He becomes a successful real estate agent until he meets Ingrid again, who has written a theater play about the encounter with Edward. Edward auditions for the main role and he captures Ingrid’s heart with ...

It’s surprising that Jacques Audiard has never worked in Hollywood. The Frenchman’s films are cineastic spectacles: visually impressive, emotion and action-packed melodramas or thrillers with larger than life protagonists. However, Audiard has a soft spot for people in the margins of society, whether it’s young prisoners with Maghrebian roots (A PROPHET), a killer whale trainer (RUST AND BONE) or a Sri Lankan refugee (DHEEPAN). EMILIA PÉREZ, set in Mexico, also moves outside of bourgeois etiquette: lawyer Rita is frustrated. There’s corruption everywhere and her talent isn’t ...

The Pope has died and Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) has to shoulder the responsibility of picking a new one. The centuries-long procedure of the conclave, in which all cardinals of the Catholic Church are locked together in Rome until a two-thirds majority has been found for a new pope, offers the ideal backdrop for a thriller with its rules and rituals. No wonder that Robert Harris, master of historical crime novels, chose this subject from modern-day Rome.

After ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, Edward Berger stages a war of a different kind. There are civilized battles here, ...

NO OTHER LAND won the Best Documentary Prize at the Berlinale and the Panorama Audience Award in the documentary category. The award ceremony turned into a scandal, because, among other things, the Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham spoke of “apartheid“ during the gala. Yuval did not mean the Palestinians living in Israel, but the conditions in the occupied territories. Since 2010, Israel’s government has forced the construction of new settlements in the West Bank with official military support for the settlers. NO OTHER LAND, directed by Arab activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist ...

Barbe-Nicole Pomardin-Clicquot’s widowhood lasted for more than 60 years. Thomas Napper’s WIDOW CLICQUOT focuses on 10 of those years, when this young, dreamy yet energetic woman fought to save her inherited winery. And there are flashbacks to the short marriage with François Clicquot, to whom she was connected to not only by an ordinary love but also by a strangely esoteric love of wine. She remains faithful to Napper, who died in 1805 of typhus or madness, no one knows for sure - in wine or champagne. Barbe, played by Haley Bennett, perseveres, sometimes gracefully in an empire dress, ...

Anora, also called Ani (Mikey Madison), can only speak a bit of broken Russian, but that is more than the other sex workers in the strip club in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn can offer on that particular night, and so she is the one keeping young oligarch son Ivan, called Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) company. Vanya isn’t just clearly stinking rich, but also handsome, pretty charming, and playful, actually a teenager. When he isn’t hiring escorts or throwing a party, he plays Playstation. When Vanya books Anora’s services for an exclusive week, it’s easy for her to say yes, and when he suggests ...

Ali Abbasi chooses to begin his film with Richard Nixon’s infamous “I am not a crook“ speech. It goes downhill from there. THE APPRENTICE is about Donald Trump’s “apprenticeship years“ with Roy Cohn, who was one of the prosecutors in the 1951 trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and boasted about having arranged for the execution of the defendants. Cohn became the right hand mand of communist hunter Joseph McCarthy after and in the 70s he was the lawyer and political “fixer“ for mafia bosses like Tony Salerno and Carmine Galante.

Cohn (Jeremy Strong, most known for his role as ...

In his first feature film, US director Josh Margolin creates a cinematic monument to his own grandmother. The heroine of the film is just 93, not 103 like his own grandmother, but she is definitely still in top form. Thelma Post (June Squibb) lives alone in Los Angeles. Her husband died two years ago. Since then, her grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger) lovingly takes care of her and teaches her how to use the computer. Even though she’s still mentally fit, Thelma falls for a scammer. He claims that Danny is in prison and gets her to put 10,000 dollars in an envelope and send it via mail. Thelma ...

Henry James’ novella “The Beast in the Jungle” is about a man who can’t commit to a woman’s love because he is waiting for a catastrophe to happen in his life. In Patrice Chiha’s recent THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE, the story was set in club culture between 1980 and 2020, but stayed relatively close to James' story. Betrand Bonello’s adaptation THE BEAST is looser with James’ template. In his film, the protagonist is a woman, Gabrielle (Lea Seydoux). Whereas the fear of catastrophe is primarily psychological with James, and the protagonist has to realize in the end that the death ...

Sylvia has a structured routine meant to give her and her daughter Anna the most safety and routine: regular AA meetings, visits to her younger sister Olivia and her family, working in an institution for people with mental impairments during the day. It’s a New York life far away from all the glamour. And it is hard-fought, as director Michel Franco slowly reveals. Sylvia has been sober for 13 years, and the security system on her door and her controlling manner towards Anna suggest that she has a past marked by insecurity and fear. At a high school reunion, Saul sits next to her. Sylvia ...

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 ...