Toni Erdmann is a two-hour and 42-minute-long comedy in German, and I foreground that fact because I feel like if I went on and on about how completely wonderful it is, and only at the end got around to mentioning those facts, you would probably consider that I was trying to play a trick on […]

There’s something undeniably medicinal about the notion of yet another film in which the psychic scars of the Holocaust play out in a post-war European domestic drama. Even when they are very, very good, the questions loom: what’s actually left to say about this topic? And dear God, is it at least being said in […]

A review requested by Branden, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Writer-director Wim Wenders’s The American Friend is, arguably, not a very good adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game at all: it backs off on the thriller elements considerably, alters the tone, jettisons important plot details and changes […]

Once upon a time (the rumor goes), two sisters both loved and lusted after important 18th Century German author/critic Friedrich Schiller (Florian Stetter), and it’s at this point that we perhaps tense up a little bit in regards to Beloved Sisters, recalling all of the other person that find Long-Dead Important Artist Better-Known By Academics […]

I have on three different occasions now described Only Lovers Left Alive as Vampires Who Write for Pitchfork: The Movie, and I still don’t have the damnedest idea if I mean that in a disparaging or highly complimentary way. It’s that kind of movie, where the singular weirdness of it more than trumps judgments that […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/17 & 10/20 & 10/22 World premiere: 29 September, 2013, Hamburg Film Festival Winner of the Silver Hugo for Best Actress (Nadeshda Brennicke) The temptation to make all true-life stories about criminals valorised in the media the full-on Bonnie and Clyde treatment is as alive and well in Europe as in the […]

Every Sunday this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: the grueling Transformers: Dark of the Moon is not original in any meaningful way, and does not claim to […]

In retrospect, it was my great misfortune to finally catch up with Maren Ade’s Everyone Else in such immediate proximity to its thematic cousin Blue Valentine; not only because watching two pornographically detailed dramas about break-ups in two days puts you in a bit of an unsound place, mentally speaking, but more importantly, because the […]

By turns triumphant and obnoxiously opaque, My Joy is at once terribly difficult to come to grips with, and impossible to shake, and it’s both of these things for very much the same reason. There are two halves to the film, which is not the least of the reasons it’s so wholly inscrutable, and the […]

Whatever single adjective describes Short Sharp Shock, Head-On, and The Edge of Heaven, it is assuredly not “frothy” – and yet here we are, with director Fatih Akin making himself a breezy farce about restaurant management and the joy of food, Soul Kitchen, and it is simultaneously a great deal frothier than any of those […]

There are so many words you could use to describe the work of Michael Haneke: bold, provocative, cruel, cold, intellectual, confusing, cryptic, frustrating, alienating, disturbing, exhilarating. He’s a bit of a wild boy like that. There’s one word that not only would I never have used, I’d have denied the possibility I might ever feel […]

You don’t get to describe a film as a farcical socialist thriller very often, but then most films aren’t like Berlin – 1st of May, a sort of anthology film following three intertwined adventures in the city of Berlin. I say “sort of” an anthology, because unlike the traditional example of the form, this isn’t […]