High school friends Amy and Molly have been denying themselves all kinds of fun and shenanigans in order to get into a good college. Their plan worked out but when they find out that many of their classmates managed the same while partying throughout the year, they have a new goal: attend the hottest party of the night and thoroughly misbehave before the sun rises on their graduation day. And maybe also get a little physical with their respective crushes....

A thoroughly entertaining high school comedy with a lot of heart. more

SEARCHING EVA is a documentary character study of Eva Collé, an Italian social media star living in Berlin. A fashion model, sex worker, and blogger, Eva has followers all over the world. Comments from her anonymous fans, shown in white text on a black screen, represent strangers who project their dreams, hopes, and anxieties onto her. The first time we see Eva, she is buried in sand and staring directly at us, the sound of the ocean nearby.

It would seem to director Pia Hellenthal that Eva came from the sea. Like her narrative counterpart Mona in Agnes Varda’s VAGABOND ... more

Petrunya stands in an empty swimming pool. A hardcore punk song with the lyrics “FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!“ blasts out of the soundtrack. A nice setting of the tone. Petrunya is fed up: with her life, Macedonia, the fact that shes‘s in her early 30s and an unemployed historian, and especially with her mother. She has arranged a job interview for her again, though it‘s clear from the get-go it won‘t amount to anything because Petrunya is too old, too fat, too unpolished, too whatever. The conversation isn‘t just a disaster, a guy fondles her only to then say “I wouldn‘t ... more

IM NIEMANDSLAND wastes no time setting its scene: using documentary footage from the fall of the Berlin Wall, it spends just a brief few minutes with the joyous crowds of 1989 before jumping straight into its fictional story. Katja, a 16-year-old from the West, steps across the sandy strip of No Man’s Land and through a hole in the crumbling wall, passing from West to East in mere seconds. She’s on her way to meet her father, who has decided to take back his childhood home in Kleinmachnow from the family currently living there.

The current occupants don’t plan on going anywhere, ... more

Jan-Ole Gerster responded to the pressure after OH BOY (A COFFEE IN BERLIN) by making something completely different. His second film is about Lara (Corinna Harfouch), who stands on her window sill ready to jump on the morning of her 60th birthday. The doorbell interrupts her, and afterwards she decides to face the day. Her son Viktor (Tom Schilling) is a pianist and as we find out, he has an important concert in the evening, which to her is as if it was her own concert. The retired administrator has nothing to do and no one to celebrate with. Like a revenant, she visits past life ... more

When Daniel J. Jones is assigned by the U.S. Senate to investigate the CIA, the agency gives him a basement office to work in, but no office printer. “But paper is how we keep track of laws,” says Jones (Adam Driver) to a CIA official. The agent replies: “Paper gets people in trouble.”

THE REPORT is a dramatization of how one man created the largest paper trail investigation in the history of the U.S. Senate — the 6,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture. That report, which the public can access today only in redacted form, sheds light on the ... more

Everything about BAIT seems old. It was shot on grainy 16 mm black and white film that skips and scratches in a way that can‘t be digitally simulated. The houses and people of the coastal town of Cornwall look like people who have lived off of seafaring and fishing for a long time, and the weird pauses between sentences might be due to a kind of editing or acting style long considered to be unfashionable. The village seems like it‘s from a different era or reality.

On the other hand, the old fisherman house's new owner has a daughter with pants that are fashionably tight and the ... more