German

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Werner Herzog’s third feature is a haunting, sardonic exploration of Africa as it was “in the beginning,” and as it becomes glutted with the wastes of technological civilization. Amos Vogel writes of the film: “Marvelous, sensual, 360-degree travelling shots of animal cadavers, barbed wire, industrial wastes, decaying trucks, sudden oil wells, ominous surrealist tableaux — all embedded in tragically alienated landscapes of sand and disassociated natives — create an obsessional, hypnotic statement whose anti-technological, anti-totalitarian, cruelly anti-sentimental humanism is subtle, overpowering, and inexplicable to shallow Left and know-nothing Right.”Read More »

Die blaue Hand is a pretty wild movie on its own terms. It crams a lot of bizarre digressions into a mere 74 minutes, not counting some stuff reportedly inserted after the fact by an American distributor. You get a room full of hanging mannequins, a butler who reveals himself as the disgruntled ex-husband of the Emerson materfamilias, and a second inspection of the insane stripper, on top of everything I’ve already mentioned. If Kinski recedes during the story, Karl Lange emerges as an awesome looking villain in the Germanic Caligari tradition of evil asylum keepers, while Diana Koerner makes Myra an appealing heroine. Visually, even in something well short of restored form, Hand looks great in moody, Bava-influenced color, and the admitted datedness of the music is a point in the film’s favor as far as I’m concerned.Read More »

A biopic by Helma Sanders-Brahm on the life of the poet and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist. The film is based upon his letters, documents and literary works. This film won the Deutscher Filmpreis in 1977 making Sanders-Brahm the first female director to win it.Read More »

For her directorial debut, Jessica Hausner has created an honest and revealing portrait of Rita, a wilful and unruly teenager on the verge of womanhood. Her sexual awakening leads her to intimacy with a schoolboy too young and a bus driver, too old. Her efforts to break out of her solitude and claustrophobic environment isolate her even more, until one day she crosses the line…Read More »

Review by EastGermanCinema.com:
Many Britons of a certain age share a collective memory so firmly etched in their psyches that the very mention of it brings back childhood nightmares. In 1964, BBC television serialized a film about a haughty princess, a prince that turns into a bear, a giant goldfish, and a really, really evil dwarf. So powerful are the memories of this film, that thirty-eight years later BBC Radio 4 did a program on the film’s effect on an entire generation. The film was called The Singing Ringing Tree, and none of those children could have known that they were watching a film that was the product of East Germany.Read More »

Synopsis
A bored man suddenly realizes everyone around him has disappeared though he isn’t sure what happened.Read More »

This film shows the disaster of the Kuwaitian oil fields in flames. In contrast to the common documentary film there are no comments and few interviews. What must have been the hell itself is presented to the viewer in such beautiful sights and beautiful music that one has to be fascinated by it.Read More »

Synopsis
Robert and Elena are twins entangled in a tale of puberty, philosophy and sexuality.

Gröning’s screenplay centers on a brother and sister, Robert and Elena, 19-year-old twins, who spend one summer’s weekend at a petrol station out in the countryside cramming for Elena’s final exam in Philosophy.Read More »

A mill owner in the Sudetenland and his family’s lives are changed as Europe heats up in 1938.

Habermann (Czech: Habermannův mlýn) is a 2010 Czech-German-Austrian drama film directed by Juraj Herz. In the story, a German mill owner in the Sudetenland and his family’s lives are changed as Europe heats up in 1938.

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The German-Czech-Austrian production “Habermann” is being marketed — with the tagline “War is over; vengeance has begun” — as a look at a corner of history that is little known in America: the expulsion of millions of ethnic German civilians from parts of Europe after World War II. It’s a tricky tale to tell; the film’s opening and closing scenes of Germans in Czechoslovakia being rounded up and loaded onto trains consciously echo the familiar imagery of Jews being sent to Nazi concentration camps.Read More »