German

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 »

German review by Spiegel Online wrote:
Der Autorenfilmstar Christian Petzold, der schon die ‘Kreise’-Episode geschrieben und gedreht hat, hat diesen ‘Polizeiruf’ als so kunst- wie lustvollen Assoziationsstrom in Szene gesetzt. […] Mit romantischem Grimm und grimmscher Romantik zielt […] Petzold aufs kollektive Unterbewusstsein der Zuschauer und arbeitet sich durch alle Facetten des Wolfs-Topos – inklusive einer Ermittlerin, die mit rotem Mantel, vernebeltem Blick und naivem Interesse doch sehr an eine der größten Heldinnen der Gebrüder Grimm erinnert. Dabei bewahrt sich Christian Petzold seinen von aller Gefühlsrhetorik befreiten Stil. In lakonischen Dialogen holt er Angstbilder hoch, die in uns allen schlummern.Read More »

Christian Petzold’s third episode for the Polizeiruf 110 series, “Tatorte,” starring Matthias Brandt, who has a major cameo in Transit.

Episode description: A woman is executed in a secluded parking lot in front of her daughter. For assistant Nadja and Kriminalhauptkommissar Hanns von Meuffels the case seems obvious: a family drama.Read More »

Hamlet is going crazy. His father has died suddenly of a strange disease, and his mother has married her deceased husband’s brother, of all people, after just one month. Hamlet has nighttime visions of his father, who claims his brother poisoned him, and exhorts Hamlet to take revenge and kill his new stepfather. Hamlet acts the part of the crazy man in order to hide his plans, and loses his grip on reality in the process. The whole world becomes a stagnant swamp to him. Desire and sexuality become a threatening abyss. The friends surrounding him turn out to be spies deployed by his stepfather to keep an eye on him. Read More »

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First off: Fatih Akin’s “The Cut” was an aberration, as we all suspected. The director celebrated for his edgy takes on intriguing characters more or less returns with “In the Fade,” a well-constructed, at times moving story of a Hamburg woman seeking justice after the murder of her Kurdish husband and son by a couple of Neo-Nazis. “More or less” because the excellent first quarter gives way to a relatively standard-issue though handsomely produced legal drama with several stock characters and a script that feels too guided by the presumed requirements of mainstream cinema. Diane Kruger’s powerhouse performance in her first German-language production goes a long way toward compensating for the narrative’s dip into overly crystalline waters, and international sales have been unsurprisingly brisk given the film’s incontrovertible general appeal.Read More »

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The power of co-incidence is explored to dramatic effect in The Edge Of Heaven, a Turkish-German production about two deaths that bring strangers together. Once the opening titles warn us of “Yeter’s Death”, we see Turkish prostitute Yeter meeting an elderly client, Ali, in Germany and watch her fate unfold. Shifting to Turkey and Germany and back again, this spirited, beautifully-acted drama follows both Ali’s son and Yeter’s daughter in the wake of the tragedy.Read More »

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Idi Amin Dada was not the only leader of a newly independent African nation who was accused (on the basis of reliable evidence) of bizarre practices. The former French colony known as the Central African Republic was governed from 1966 to 1977 by a man known as Jean Bedel Bokassa. After he was deposed, he was accused of cannibalism. This documentary by Werner Herzog explores the years of his increasingly strange and paranoid rule of that country, and features an interview with a western journalist who was imprisoned by Bokassa as a result of a garbled telex. Bokassa was ousted shortly after he staged an elaborate, widely publicized and very expensive coronation for himself as the “Emperor” of the Republic, during a state visit to another African country.Read More »

Synopsis: Ralf König, one of the most successful German cartoonists, became famous with his comic book “The Most Desired Man,” which was made into a film starring Til Schweiger back in 1994. Wittily playing with queer clichés, he also reaches a wide heterosexual audience. In King of Comics, busy filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim (The Einstein of Sex, I Am My Own Woman, Rent Boys) portrays an unpretentious and modest man whom, with brilliant observational skills, has left his outlandish, yet intelligent, incredibly fun and delightfully graphic mark on an entire generation.Read More »

When a wealthy man dies, his avaricious relatives look forward to inheriting all his money. However, he leaves a provision in his will that they all must spend a week together in his castle before they will be able to inherit anything. At the castle (which is cut off from the outside world), the relatives soon begin to be killed off one by one, each strangled with an Indian scarf. The estate’s executor, a lawyer, sets out to find the killer before everyone–including himself–is murdered.Read More »