Micheal Caine has said that THE GREAT ESCAPER will be his last him and that he will now retire at age 90. Caine acts alongside Glenda Jackson, who passed away this year, who was, like Caine, a star of British cinema of the 60s and 70s. THE GREAT ESCAPER tells the story of real 90 year old world war veteran Bernard Jordan, who secretly disappeared from his care home in 2014 in order to attend a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of D-Day. Jordan became a media hero in Britain after the police had already issued a search notice and called it off again with #thegreatescaper - a reference to ...

Smoke rises over the rugged snow-covered landscape. It’s ice-cold outside, inside there’s sweating. The documentary SMOKE SAUNA SISTERHOOD by director Anna Hints follows a group of Estonian women in their traditional ritual of the smoke sauna. “Hello, dear Sauna,“ says each one before entering the wood cabin that is heated by a stone oven. When they leave they say thank you – to the sauna itself and the women “who do the labor,“ who make all of these experiences possible. The intimate conversations among women are just as important as the sauna, ice baths, and the mutual ...

Kurdish-German Elaha is engaged and should be looking foward to her wedding day. But she know that part of the wedding will be an examination of her hymen, which is no longer intact. She she tries to earn enough money for reconstructive surgery in time for the big day.

In 2017 The New Yorker published a short story by Kristen Roupenian called “Cat Person.“ The story is about college student Margot who meets the older Robert while working as a cinema cashier. He is a bit dismissive, she has a bit of a crush. They text for a while, have tense dates, and go to his place. The sex is bad, but Margot doesn’t stop it. After they stop seeing each other, Robert becomes abusive. The events, told from Margot’s perspective, perfectly captured conflicting expectations, gendered misunderstandings and microaggressions and sparked a worldwide debate on the ...

The Irish film THE QUIET GIRL was in the Berlinale youth section “Generation Kplus“ and won both the International Jury Prize as well as the Children’s Jury Prize. The film is now opening in cinemas, and isn’t just meant for children. The emotional power of Colm Bairéad’s directing and the virtuoso camerawork by Kate McCullough, who won the European Film Prize for this film, turns what is a simple story into an extraordinary film.


The film is about Cáit, who comes from a poor family with many siblings, an alcoholic, unloving and arrogant father and a completely overwhelmed ...

Young Afghan Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) worked as a translator for the US military in Kabul until she was forced to flee to Fremont in northern California after the Taliban takeover. Plagued by guilt and insomnia, triggered by the thoughts of the family she left behind, she spends her days between monotonous work in a cookie fortune factory, weekly therapy sessions with a pro-bono therapist (Gregg Turkington) and the loneliness of her small apartment. When the writer of the fortune cookie messages dies on the job, Donya takes her chance and, in search of a meaningful connection, mixes a piece ...

Successful writer Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is being interviewed by a student in the mountain villa where she lives with her writer husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their blind son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner). Samuel, who is renovating in a different floor, plays the 50 Cent song “P.I.M.P“ at full volume and disrupts the interview, and the women stop because of it. Sandra will later say she went to sleep after that. Daniel takes the dog out for a walk. When the boy returns, his father lies dead next to a shed. He allegedly fell out of the attic window. The prosecutor accuses Sandra of ...

In the basement of a typical American suburb home there’s a bloody corpse and an empty jar next to it. Whatever the jar contained has disappeared. Indian-American teenager Tamira (Mohana Krishnan) brings the same jar to the high school cafeteria shortly after. She looks very jittery, with emtpy eyes and stringy hair in the typical RINGU look. Her former best friend Samidha, nicknamed Sam (Megan Suri), wants to have nothing to do with Tamira anymore and just be an American. The embarrassing ex-BFF, who follows Hindu traditions, also stands in the way of Sam's crush on the nice school demigod ...

THE LESSON is a cold psychological thriller reminiscent of Claude Chabrol from a distance. Oxford student Liam – which Daryl McCormack plays as a well-ironed, well-sorted person, all pleasant surface and courteous behavior, but also a bit transparent – gets hired by renowned writer J.M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant). Liam is meant to tutor his son Bertie (Stephen MacMillan) so he can get into Oxford, but he is just as interested in Sinclair himself, since he happens to be the object of his dissertation. In the Sinclair household, a tense coldness looms. Richard E. Grant is excellent as ...

No one sends letters anymore. This is why pensioner Harold Fry (Jim Broadbent) is bewildered to receive a handwritten letter from his former colleague Queenie (Linda Bassett). She wants to say goodbye because she is in a hospice with terminal cancer. When Harold makes his way to the mailbox with a puny response, he gets another idea after a brief exchange with a young clerk at the local gas station: he decides to walk from Devon in southern England to Berwick-upon-Tweed on the border of Scotland in order to give his letter to Queenie in person. He leaves his wife Maureen (Penelope Wilton) ...

The Osage Nation, who were originally located in Missouri, were driven out and settled in the “Indian Territories” of Oklahoma. The Osage bought the grazing land which they lived in, and when big oil deposits were discovered under the prairie in 1894, the Osage people became the richest First Nations tribe. The “Osage Indian Murders” occurred between 1918 and 1931. At least 60 Osage people were murdered, almost always with the goal of getting their money.

In KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, Martin Scorsese unfurls a social panorama of Osage County at the beginning of the 20th century. ...

When Ingeborg Bachmann (Vicky Krieps) visits Max Frisch (Ronald Zehrfeld) in Zurich for the first time, the following dialog occurs. After he shows her his apartment, opens the door to the living room and says “...but we won’t talk about literature today any more.” “What else should we talk about?” asks Bachmann. “About your smile,“ answers Frisch.

The scene sums up what Margarethe von Trotta is focused on in her biopic. She gives a look into the failure of the relationship. What’s primarily at fault are the social norms and Frisch’s traditional ideas about women that ...

A bewildered young man is stopped at a checkpoint behind the wheel of a truck full of dogs, wounded and dressed in an evening gown. The young man, Doug (Caleb Landry Jones, GET OUT) is taken to the police station and interrogated by psychiatrist Evelyn (Jojo T. Gibbts). He gradually tells her about his miserable youth, after which he couldn’t walk anymore and didn’t trust most humans, his one love who disappointed him but showed him the path to reinvention, and how he became the supernatural protector of the weak. And of course, the love that connects him to dogs.

DOGMAN deals with a ...

A mother, a writer, and two social media stars meet on a plane – sounds like the beginning of a joke – but it’s Hafesteinn Gunnar’s new film. It has a promising beginning: a group of people want to overcome their fear of flying in a training program. While the characters in the film get a bit of substance, protagonist Sarah (Lydia Leonard) is primarily one thing: a mother. She wants to see her family, which is why she has to learn how to fearlessly fly. NORTHERN COMFORT is strongest in the confined space of the plane. All of the panic and ecstasy of the passengers is acted out here. ...

THE QUEEN, PHILOMENA, FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS – Stephen Frears has a penchant for women who unwavering follow their own path, whether it’s an unusual career like the Queen, a self-appointed mission, or a personal eccentricity. Philippa Langley, played by Sally Hawkins in THE LOST KING, also has a mission. At a theater performance of Shakespeare’s “Richard III,“ she suddenly develops sympathy for the deformed King, perhaps also because she is battling MC/CFS herself and is often underestimated by her environment. She is convinced that the portrait unjustly turned him into an ...

1988 in Newcastle, northern England: Jean (Rosy McEwen) is a lesbian PE teacher who is trying her best to survive unscathed in an extremely heteronormative society. Her family knows “it“ but she isn’t out at work. How can she be? With the “Section 28“ act, Margaret Thatcher banned “the promotion of homosexuality“ in institutions (like schools). Teachers, especially sports teacher, are under special observation. When Jean’s student Lois (Lucy Halliday) shows up at the local LGBTQ+ club, Jean’s carefully nurtured double life is put to the test. Based on the diaries of PE ...

A young colombian filmmaker wanted to make a film about ghosts and cast the queer subculture of the city in it. But when the main actor suddenly dies of an overdose, the film's development takes an entirely new direction.

A flying ashtray, an interdimensional fruit, an Amazon delivery. SOMETHING IN THE DIRT is absurd and creative, but also very arbitrary. The directing duo Aaaron Moorhead and Justin Benson have made a new cosmic sci-fi film after RESOLUTION (2012), THE ENDLESS (2017) and the Netflix series “Archive 81.“ In this film dedicated to “the friends of the filmmakers“ they appear in front of the camera as well as behind it - due to the pandemic.

John (Aaron Moorhead) and Levi (Justin Benson) are experiencing a seemingly supernatural phenomenon in Levi‘s run-down apartment. They decide to ...

In the Danish horror film SPEAK NO EVIL by Christian Tafdrup, barbarism confronts politeness conventions. Björn and Luise, a reserved, friendly Danish couple with a little daughter, meet Patrick and Karin, a more extroverted Dutch couple with a silent little boy, while on their vacation in Tuscany. Back in Denmark, they receive an invitation to Holland via postcard. They feel obligated to accept the invitation. “What‘s the worst that could happen“? Björn asks rhetorically. Sune Kølster‘s film music implies doom while the images still show routine drives, dinners, and ferry ...

Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien is a permanent guest at European film festivals. In 1989 he won the Golden Lion in Venice for the film A CITY OF SADNESS. He was nominated for the Palme d‘Or in Cannes six times. There‘s a reason why he‘s described as the co-founder of the Taiwanese Nouvelle Vague. Over here, the cinema of the auteur is still relatively undiscovered. None of his films are available on DVD here. It is all the more gratifying, then, that the distributor Rapid Eye Movies is bringing a central work of the director to German cinemas around 20 years after it was ...

“Oh I so wish you remembered.“ The French title of Aki Kaurismäki‘s film FALLEN LEAVES is LES FEUILLES MORTES, like Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma chanson, which became famous in the version of Yves Montand and Juliette Greco before it became a world hit as “Autumn Leaves“ in the hundreds of versions by Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone, and others. Les Feuilles Mortes is a love song about remembering a song about love: “ C’est un chanson qui nous resemble/Toi, tu m'aimais et je t'aimais“ (It‘s a song that is like us, you loved me, I loved you“). Serge ...

The “Grande Adamant,“ a house boat on the Seine, is a day clinic and cultural center for people with mental distress. The patients of a Parisian psychiatric hospital come here to do activities together, but not only that: it‘s a space where they can co-organize and shape. The French documentary SUR L‘ADAMANT, dedicated to the people at Adamant and their daily life, won the Golden Bear at this year‘s Berlinale

Art and music play a central role at the Adamant. Many of the people in the film are enthusiastic cineastes, talented musicians, painters or poets that get the opportunity to ...

In “Orlando – A Biography“ (1928), Virginia Woolf describes the live of an aristocrat who transforms from a man to a woman over the course of a very long life. In heteronormative literary history, the likely bisexual writer and her Orlando were always dissociated from their queerness. In the experimental film ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY, binary and non-binary trans artists intervene in the cultural history discourse and enter into the battle for the sovereignty of interpretation with humor and poetry.

For director and philosopher Paul B. Preciado, Virginia Woolf is a literary role ...

The second remake of the Spanish film EL DESCONOCIDO (2015) after Christian Alvart‘s DON‘T. GET. OUT has the same simple premise: family father Matt is taking his two kids (Lilly Aspell und Jack Champion) to school after having a fight with his wife Heather (Embeth Davidtz).A fter a few minutes in the car, he received a phone call from an unknown caller. There‘s a bomb under the driver‘s seat that could explode with the smallest weight change in the vehicle. Thus begins the search for the mysterious caller, the desperate attempt to keep the children safe, and a manhunt for Matt, who ...

Like the recent TALK TO ME, SKINAMARINK originated from a YouTube channel. On “BitesizedNightmares“, Canadian fllmmaker Kyle Edward Ball filmed nightmares, his own and those of his viewers. SKINAMARINK became a hot topic on Reddit and other platforms when the complete film was leaked online before its official release and later became an unimaginable film success for an experimental film. It also became the most contentious horror film in a long time. The opinions about the film range from “the scariest film of all time“ to “as exciting as watching paint dry.“ The internet is full ...

Mary Harron (I SHOT ANDY WARHOL, AMERICAN PSYCHO) has made a film about the life of Salvador Dalí (Ben Kingsley) and his wife Gala (Barbara Sukowa) in the 1970s, when the two of them held court in a New York hotel and and Dalí was more of a TV star than an artist. It‘s about the contrast between glamor and aging. Dalí‘s closeness to the Franco regime, which reached its height in the 1970s with his equestrian portrait of Franco's granddaughter and the regime's support of executions, does not feature here. The protagonist is the young, handsome James (Cristopher Briney), who works for ...

Ria Khan (Priya Kansara) is primarily one thing – a ball of energy. When the British-Pakistani teen isn‘t dragging her big sister Lena (Ritu Arya) out of bed so she can help her film her martial arts videos or practicing high kicks, she is challenging her competitors to a fight at her girls‘ school. Her big dream is to become a stunt woman. Lena‘s big dream was to become an artist, but she just dropped out of the London College of Art due to her depression. Ria looks on with worry as her once very cool sister dates slick Salim, a mamma‘s body from a well-to-do family, instead of ...

In THE INSPECTION, Elegance Bratton directs a film inspired by personal experience in a straightforward, powerful way: after coming out, he was kicked out by his mother and lived on the street, before he finished basic training to become a marine. Later on he became an army photographer, studied, and began a film career as a documentarian. THE INSPECTION, his first fiction film, is focused on his time at boot camp: Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) has hit rock bottom when he visits his mother to get his birth certificate in order to become a soldier. Inez (Gabrielle Union), a tough woman who is ...

The stories of artists and intellectuals who escaped into exile have been told many times. What is less highlighted and more morally ambivalent are the fates of those who stayed. From today‘s standpoint, for example, it is hard to understand why a writer banned by the Nazis like Erich Kästner, who looked on as his books were burned in 1933, didn‘t leave the country. Gottfried Benn, Hans Fallada, Ina Seidel and many others also stayed. Anatole Regnier wanted to understand their motivations better, not to judge from today‘s standpoint, but to better understand daily live and the ...

From the restrained beginning to its tender end, PAST LIVES is a film in which every nuance is right, capturing every subtle oscillation that hangs in the air between the three protagonists, never saying too much or too little.

Director Celine Song approaches the topic very carefully, because she knows that something things disappear when you shine a light that‘s too bright or label it too soon. In the beginning you see three people sitting in a bar. The woman in the middle is having a lively conversation with the man to her right. To the left there‘s another man, somewhat closer. He ...

I have often asked myself how many different life models and worldviews can be found in the externally peaceful Berlin apartment building I live in, where I co-exist in a confined space. During the Covid-19 pandemic there was a stronger feeling that you couldn‘t agree on basic assumptions in small and larger social settings. Asli Özge is dealing with a similar issue in BLACK BOX. In a Berlin apartment building, the police imposes a ban on going out due to an unspecified suspicion of terrorism. A car is towed, an apartment is searched, the trapped residents meet in the courtyard, which has ...

Strictly speaking, this text should come with a spoiler warning, because it‘s hard to write about Robert Rodriguez‘s new film without revealing something. On the other hand: if a film is called HYPNOTIC, you can already guess that not everything is as it appears here. When the first scene with Ben Affleck playing cop Daniel Rourke tells a psychiatrist that his daughter Minnie disappeared without a trace a few years ago, you don‘t have to believe every word that is said. Even if the entire world believes that Minnie is long dead, Rourke has not given up hope and is therefore not ...

“I betrayed a part of myself / so I could play along,“ are the lyrics in “Eine Wirklichkeit,“ the theme song of GESCHLECHTERKAMPF – DAS ENDE DES PATRIARCHATS. Marga (Margarita Breitkreitz) successfully played along for a while – on the most prestigious German theater stages. But now she‘s 42 and sitting at the employment office in front of her career counsellor who is trying to convince her to work at a call center.

The essay film by screenwriter Margarita Breitkreitz and director Sobo Swobodnik primarily focuses on acting – the roles for women over 40 are missing ...

Brothers Danny and Micheal Phillipou are the Australian equivalent of The Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE). While The Daniels first practiced with very extreme and very funny shorts, the Phillipous found success with their anarchist, hyperactive YouTube channel “RackaRacka.“ Their first horror feature TALK TO ME is being distributed by the legendary US company A24 who have also produced The Daniels films. TALK TO ME is a teen horror film which pays tribute to the Japanese RINGU franchise as well as Polanski‘s paranoid classic ROSEMARY‘S BABY.

Mia ...

Recent mainstream big productions have often not been about much, to put it mildly. There has been a lot of progress when it comes to the representation of people of color, women, and queer people, there were also several (anti-) war films with humanist messages, but it‘s been a long time since there has been anything as powerfully political as Christopher Nolan‘s OPPENHEIMER about the survival of humanity. Those who grew up on Nolan‘s BATMAN films, Marvel and DC comic adaptations, have to regard OPPENHEIMER as an out and out masterpiece.

OPPENHEIMER is the right film at the right ...

Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie film provided me with a lot of joy in the run-up to its release. The trailer, poster, and clips that the tireless marketing team strategically placed on social media for months spread candy-bright cheerfulness and became viral hits in the middle of the post-pandemic and pre-fascism. Women finally had the upper hand in encyclopedic nerd knowledge in the accompanying debates. Not just those who played with Barbies – also those whose families frowned upon the blonde career doll with the anorexic hourglass figure as an evil capitalist symbol were welcome in the ...

The words “Be Bold!“ are seen in neon in the shop window and Eva (Alexandra Gilbreath) is plucking up her courage. She just received her first bonus and is buying a dress with a plunging neckline at a fancy boutique. She wants to inspire her husband, who isn‘t giving her the attention she craves after 30 years of marriage. In order to not fall apart due to her yearning for physical satisfaction, Eva recently started working at Art of Love in addition to her job at the London transport service. Her reviews of individual products are well received by the company head and the customers, ...

François Ozon makes cold, intricate films, usually thrillers or love stories that are constructed like criminal cases and need to be decrypted. Every few years, he indulges in a loud farce with a feminist twist. In the crime movie with musical numbers 8 WOMEN (2002), the only man on set is a dead man. The suspects are eight divas of French cinema, among them Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, Isabelle Huppert, and Ludivine Sagnier. In POTICHE (2010) Catherine Deneuve plays the wife of a patriarchal umbrella factory owner who takes over the company while her husband is recovering from a heart ...

Wes Anderson, in the vein similar to David Lynch, makes films for himself and an audience that has already fallen for his aesthetic and his quirky stories and characters.

Just like in his past films, the plot is a Russian nesting doll of interlacing layers: the camera films a recording of a TV program about the genesis of a play and the difficulties and obstacles that need to be overcome by the premiere, but the core of the film is the plot of the play itself. The props are delivered by a freight train during the opening credits, and the camera avoids any lateral movements which could reveal ...

“How to Blow Up a Pipeline“ is a manifesto that Swedish Marxist climate activist Andreas Malm wrote shortly after the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic during the ban on large-scale demonstrations and mass strikes. The German translation was published in November 2021. Malm propagated a strategy of disruption through militancy and sabotage. The feature film HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE by Daniel Goldhaber builds on Malm‘s book and illustrates its strategy. The political thriller follows the operations of a group that wants to bomb an oil pipeline as meticulously as Jean-Pierre Melville ...

A provincial hairdressing competition, maybe in a London suburb. Hair stylist Cleve is angry because her masterpiece can‘t be shown in the competition. The competition has been cancelled because the competing hairdresser Mosca is dead, and has also been scalped. The participants and models have been instructed not to leave the premises before the police has completed their on-site investigation. But the police doesn‘t appear in the film at all. MEDUSA DELUXE is a whodunnit without a detective. The technical highlight - everything is filmed as a one-take, (seemingly) without editing – is ...

When Mario Falek ((Luka Dimić)) joins the armed forces, he is already a bit older as well as cheeky and gay. He is immediately sent to the guard that is supervised by vice lieutenant Eismayer (Gerhard Liebmann). With a severe look and pulsating veins in his neck, he is the prototype of a brutal drill sergeant – and by far the worst thing that can happen to you during training. Eismayer uses every opportunity to insult, degrade, and punish the young men in his regiment. There are rumors then not everyone has survived his brutal drills. At home with his wife and their son, things are very ...

Portraying the life of Nan Goldin – an icon of queer photography and an influential activist, means bringing the personification of rebellion to the screen. Born in an American suburb, Goldin discovered the stultifying grip of conformity early on in life. Her older sister is labeled “mentally ill“ because she explored her sexuality – her feelings for boys and girls. The tragic fate of her sister paved the way for fighting back with her own weapons. For Goldin, photography becomes the medium for visibility. She captures everything that society doesn‘t want to see with her camera: ...

SPARTA has a scandal that led to the cancellation of a planned premiere at the Toronto Film Festival: Der Spiegel reported physical assaults towards the child actors, several workers accused Seidl, and he took legal action.

SPARTA is the counterpart to Ulrich Seidl‘s RIMINI – at first the films were meant to be one feature film. While RIMINI follows the washed up singer Richie Bravo as he struggles to survive in the sad idyll of an Italian vacation spot, SPARTA portrays his brother Ewald, a power plant controller in Romania. Ewald ends the relationship with his Romanian girlfriend, ...

It‘s hard to believe that A THOUSAND AND ONE is the debut of A.V. Rockwell. Rockwell directors so confidently and bravely. With no hesitation, the director changes the tempo and mood and seamlessly switches from vibrating street scenes to intimate dialogue situation. The city of New York is a protagonist, but it takes a long time until the film allows us to take a look at the long city streets. At first, we‘re in Harlem in the 90s. Filmed from below, so that the colorful, run-down brick houses tower over her, Inez (Teyana Taylor) is always out and about, freshly out of prison, looking for ...

After Ari Aster‘s family horror in HEREDITARY and the folk horror in MIDSOMMAR, the director has made a film that can‘t be categorized into a genre. BEAU IS AFRAID is a comedy, but a terrifying one. Ari Ari himself has called BEAU IS AFRAID a “Jewish Lord of the Rings.“ Mordor is Beau‘s mother. BEAU IS AFRAID is a mythical hell ride.

This hell begins when Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), a soft man who‘s around 50, leaves this therapist‘s office as his therapist warns him to keep his expectations realistic. The street where Beau lives in his shabby apartment is a chaotic urban ...

Michael (Jim Parsons) and Kit (Ben Aldridge) have been dating for some time and Kit insists on finally going to Michael‘s place. He hums and haws, and when he opens the door to his apartment it becomes clear why: the apartment is littered with thousands of smurfs. Shelves with Mike‘s smurfs collection covers every inch of free space, smurf posters are on the walls, there‘s even smurf bed sheets. Kit is about to end things, but he stays. Based on the autobiographical novel by Michael Ausiello, SPOILER ALERT tells the love story of Kit and Michael. A lot about Kit and Michael‘s love ...